Passenger wellness, health and comfort are growing topics of discussion within aviation, especially as airlines push ultra-long-haul flight thresholds at twenty-plus hours. One option is setting aside space for inflight stretching, like on Qantas’ Project Sunrise Airbus A350-1000, but another is to do it within the seat area.
Your author remembers with some patchouli-tinged fondness early movement in this wellness space from British Airways almost exactly thirty years ago, called ‘Well-Being in the Air’, together with some in-seat stretching and exercise videos: rolling your ankles, stretching your arms above your head, that sort of thing.
Three decades later, of course, options include adding sensors and gamification to encourage people to keep moving, as Recaro Aircraft Seating started to float at this summer’s Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg.
The idea is to add sensors into seats in order to encourage passengers to take part in muscle stretching and toning exercises, based on research from German universities around the benefits of programmatically tensing and relaxing muscles to develop those muscles.
Recaro’s chief brand and design officer Hartmut Schürg tells Runway Girl Network that the seatmaker is examining “the possibility for long range flights, starting now with a demonstrator, R Horizon, at the show in Hamburg. Now, the idea is that you have a set of sensors in the seat, they are connected to the IFE system, which we showed — we worked together with Panasonic on this, there’s an interface which works — and then we have the possibility, which is still in development, to train.”
The idea is that the sensors are invisibly embedded into the seat. Image: John Walton
If you’re thinking this all sounds a little bit like some sort of seat-integrated sky Kegels, you’re not alone. But between the GripTok trend, the ongoing popularity of apps like Calm, airlines who have partnered with Headspace for more than a decade, and the gamification of daily movement like Apple Watches exhorting their wearers to ‘close their rings’, it’s clear that there’s an appetite out there for this sort of thing.
The R Horizon demonstrator is a smart way for Recaro to be able to show pre-market options to airlines, suppliers, partners and others within the industry, and in 2023 also included options like an internally lighted shelf structure and sub-surface integrated seat controls.
“The first step,” Schürg says, “was just customer feedback… what is the market thinking about that? What’s very important is we have a scientific background, we don’t look at it as a gadget. It’s really something where we believe it will have a benefit to the customer, and it will do something against the negative effects of sitting too long.”
R Horizon also demonstrated internally lit structures and sub-surface controls. Image: John Walton
Clearly, sensors and connections will add weight and complexity, so this may — initially at least — be mainly for premium cabins. Indeed, further back in the aircraft there would be real questions as to the overall impact to neighbouring passengers of any in-seat exercise programme elements.
When BA introduced ‘Well-Being in the Air’ thirty years ago, Boeing 777s were mostly 9-abreast, and today’s mostly 10-abreast cabins means passengers are often touching their neighbours shoulder-to-shoulder, and ergo, that movement is immediately felt.
Indeed, it may be that different parallels to consumer tech might be better received: Apple Watch’s reminders if you’ve been sitting too long, for example, rather than its more strenuous exercise features.
That said, the industry seems to be enthusiastic about the overall idea. “The response was quite positive. Of course, the details are what matters, and one clear message was it needs to be very, very, very simple. It needs to be self explanatory, it needs to work for everybody, it needs to be very robust,” Schürg concludes.
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Featured image credited to the author, John Walton
