David PalmerDavid Palmer is known in massage circles as the father of chair massage. Mr. Palmer thought that most people would not want to undress in a massage office and have oil put on them by a stranger and then pay a high fee and give up a big block of time for a table massage.
Mr. Palmer wanted to bring massage to everyone so in 1984, he hired a French cabinetmaker named Serge Bouyssou and together they designed the first massage chair and introduced it to the public in 1986. It was a wooden chair that did not fold. Heavy and definitely not portable, yet it was a chair. Having been the director of a massage institute that performed a lot of Japanese Amma, he developed a routine for the chair based on Amma. Mr. Palmer founded TouchPro Institute in 1986 and he taught chair massage for continuing education credits for massage therapists. He made the term "chair massage" widely known and the term "onsite massage" for massage brought to the client. Now he has created Zubio, which is a type of kiosk where the client is massaged in a chair in privacy inside of a booth. Zubio is designed to be used in retail locations so that people do not have to feel self-conscious about being massaged in public. Palmer launched Zubio in November 2005 in a mall in San Francisco. He feels it will change chair massage for the better. Photos of Zubio look really cool.
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