Massage from this robot will kill your back pain!

Singapore : A technology start-up in Singapore has designed a robot masseuse that specialises in back and knee massages.

Named Emma, short for Expert Manipulative Massage Automation, the robot mimics the human palm and thumb to replicate therapeutic massages such as shiatsu and physiotherapy.

Emma started work on patients this week at the NovaHealth Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinic, working alongside its human colleagues - a physician and a massage therapist. 

Emma 3.0 - the first to go into public service is more compact than the first prototype unveiled last year.It uses advanced sensors to measure tendon and muscle stiffness, together with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud-based computing to calculate the optimal massage and to track a patient's recovery over a course of treatments. 

Emma has been developed by AiTreat, a technology start-up incubated at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore).The technology aims to address workforce shortages and quality consistency challenges in the healthcare industry, said Albert Zhang, an alumnus of NTU Singapore who led the development of Emma.