Will LMTs be replaced by robots?
Life is hard enough for many massage therapists these days. You’ve got to schedule appointments (or work hours), handle a wide variety of good and not-so-good clients, wash, dry, and fold thousands of sheets. In addition, you’ve got to manage space rent or contractor fees and other expenses, sanitize equipment, wear masks, keep yourself, your clients, and your family safe from covid. Not to mention pay all the bills at home, cook dinner, and countless other tasks.
You don’t need the worry of possibly losing your business or job because of robots! However, some companies are investing a lot of money to develop highly-programmed robots to do some of the work that you’re doing now. One company in Singapore, AiTreat, is doing just that:
“By creating a robotic system for soft tissue therapeutic treatment, we hope to tackle the shortage of skilled massage therapists while at the same time providing world-class healthcare treatment and lowering costs for the people.” I’ll tell you more about this technology below, with a short video showing how it works.
Being Irreplaceable
The good news is that you can build in ‘job security’ by learning the skills that make you indispensable to your clients. Many of my students are scheduling clients several weeks or months in advance for as much and as long as they want to work. Likewise, you can learn skills that are so refined and geared to the innate proprioceptive awareness of a good massage therapist that no machine can ever come close to achieving what you can with your clients.
The Ray of Light Training Direct-Indirect Technique classes offer skills that help you dive deep into the tight myofascial tissue of your clients and loosen it up fully, without hurting the client and without overworking you the therapist. By outlining these myofascial adhesions and slowly sinking into them, you follow the path of least resistance the body provides for you. Using the pressure required for the tissue to hydrate and unwind, you can help the client to experience freedom that they haven’t felt in years. As a result, range of motion increases, and restrictions in active movement dissolve.
Expert Manipulative Massage Automation
The machine that AiTreat has been developing is called EMMA – Expert Manipulative Massage Automation. The team of medical and robotic personnel initially used knowledge and skills from the world of Traditional Chinese Medicine to build EMMA:
“EMMA is equipped with sensors to measure muscle stiffness and uses 3D vision technology to analyze the patient’s body. This data can enhance our patient’s understanding of the condition…Following that, the robot will determine the best course of action for our patients based on the information stored by our Artificial Intelligence and EMMA’s robotic arm will perform the therapeutic massage.”
Here are some of the supposed ‘benefits’ that AiTreat lists for EMMA:
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“With EMMA, clinics and physicians can reduce the heavy reliance on qualified massage therapists in a time where clinics are experiencing a shortage of skilled human resources. This would overall result in lower healthcare costs for patients.” Curiously, they don’t mention how much it would cost to get a massage from an expensive robot!
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The parts of the robot that do the actual bodywork are made of silicon for softness and warmed up to 104 degrees. I guess that would be an advantage in the winter, although my hands usually warm up quickly once I start working.
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“Unlike therapy by human massage therapists which are prone to inconsistencies, therapy by EMMA guarantees unchanging precision and effort throughout the entirety of the procedure and even between sessions.” Machines can certainly be consistent, but can they be intuitive?
More ‘benefits’ of EMMA
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“With the use of information and past records of your condition stored by the Artificial Intelligence (AI), EMMA is able to customize the most effective massage procedure for you.” If you’re updating your client’s chart each time they come in, it’s easy enough to follow their progress, how much pressure you used, and what techniques worked or not. Moreover, you can be responsive to new issues that come up.
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They say the pressure from the robot is never more than an equivalent amount of pressure from an elevator door closing on your hand. If you’ve ever experienced that, you know that’s not much pressure! And that’s often not what the client needs to get the job done.
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They claim that they built the utmost safety precautions into EMMA. However, I’d trust a good hands-on practitioner before a machine any day of the week. Of course, some therapists use too much or too little pressure, both of which can be annoying. But a good therapist will beat a machine any day for a good massage. Don’t you think?
Feasibility and More Information
You may think that this is futuristic and that it would never affect you and your business. And hopefully, you’re right. But that’s also what they said in the past about phone automation, manufacturing automation, secretarial automation, warehouse automation, and countless other things that we accept as the norm now. How many millions of jobs were lost because of those “advances” in the name of progress? I can almost guarantee that some large-scale massage providers and small-scale offices, such as chiropractors, are eagerly watching this technology.
To find out more about this, here is AiTreat’s website:
https://www.aitreat.com/about-emma
Here is an article about EMMA and other robotic methods being developed or already used in therapeutic settings:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/health/ai-robot-masseuse-tcm-wellness-hnk-spc-intl/index.html?utm_term=1630665145063ca724c62f522&utm_source=cnn_Five+Things+for+Friday%2C+September+3%2C+2021&utm_medium=email&bt_ee=IgcL%2BASR6YIa0eGyQtyh6qd4Ro3sWNNdeIk8FHbHaxlPOVJP0SPaG9IhdysIGbjE&bt_ts=1630665145065
Let me know what you think about this technology. And let me know if you have any questions about DIT.
Stay well,
John
John Joseph Ray
Ray of Light Training
John is a Board Approved Continuing Education Provider through the NCBTMB
Member of the Fascia Research Society