A robot is doing massage for its customer.[Photo by Huang Fan]

A smart massage store was opened on May 12 on Liantang Road, Shiqi District of Zhongshan. The 50sqm-large store is divided into two parts, where customers will be served by robots or massagists.

The store is run by a returned doctors entrepreneur team of HIT Robot Group's Teinyo company. Wang Jin, general Manager of Teinyo, said they invested 100,000 yuan in the store, which can serve up to 9 customers at the same time with robotic and manual service. 

Wang Jin used to work as an orthopedist, a civil servant, and a sales manager of a foreign-funded medical device company. Afterwards he joined Teinyo's entrepreneur team, and, in 2017, he entered the HIT Robot Group Zhongshan industrial platform.

Teinyo has made research and development achievements in neurological nursing, orthopedic nursing and intelligent care. The model used in the newly-opened massage store is one of the "Xiaoyu" Series smart caring robots of the company.

"We open the store in hope of doing an intelligent nursing project and exploring a fast fashion massage service mode rather than making profits or selling robots," Wang Jin said.

It is reported that the store had been through a half-month trial operation previously. About 10 customers, most of which were young people, came to the store every day.

Wang Jin said customers can choose manual or "manual+robotic" service according to their own preference. Considering that half of the service was done by robots, the workload and price of the manual massage both went down.

They would put forward a franchise chain mode if the first massage store runs smoothly, Wang Jin added.