AmaMedic R7 Massage Chair Review 2024

Are you on a budget? Have you been on the hunt for a decent massage chair to help ease the pain in your aching back?

If you answered yes to both of those questions, then you may have read a few AmaMedic R7 reviews and been tempted to purchase the chair.

Before you do that, though, we’d ask that you take a few minutes to read our review. While we readily admit that the overall design of the R7 is impressive, we can’t ultimately recommend this model. In the sections that follow, we’ll tell you exactly why.

If you’re curious to know more, read on. We’ll shine a spotlight on this chair, the company behind it, what this model gets right, and ultimately, why we decided to withhold our recommendation. Let’s take a closer look.

An Overview Of The AmaMedic R7 Massage Chair

First things first: You’ve probably never heard of the AmaMedic R7 or the company that stands behind it, Titan Massage Chairs. They’re a smaller player in the massage chair industry with a limited footprint and a limited reach.

By themselves, those things aren’t the end of the world. Some people aren’t especially brand conscious, and if you’re not, you wouldn’t think twice about buying a good quality chair from a lesser-known brand.

(Author’s Note: I’m a case in point. While writing this AmaMedic massage chair review, the office chair I’m sitting in is made by Flash Furniture, a small furniture company that isn’t well known, and I wouldn’t trade my trusty chair for its weight in gold!)

At first glance, and even on closer inspection, this is a pretty solid design. It’s not a bad-looking chair, though it doesn’t make any effort to hide what it is, and it does quite a bit for the money.

The deeper you look, though, the more apparent the weaknesses and limitations of the design become.

Before we get to that, though, let’s start by giving you a quick overview of the chair itself. Here are the basics:

There’s a fair amount to talk about here. Taking it from the top, this is a sizeable piece of furniture. If you have a tiny home, or smaller home or apartment, it might be a bit of a challenge to find a permanent home for a chair like this. 

The good news is that it sports a space-saving (wall-hugging) design, meaning that it only requires about 20” of clearance between the seat back and whatever wall you place it near. That’s big and a bit of a surprise, given the modest price of the R7, so kudos to Titan for that!

Note too that it is fairly lightly built, weighing in at just 133.2 pounds, so it’s not difficult to move the chair around if and as you need to.

The downside is that the R7 doesn’t support as much user weight as we’d like to see. While there’s no formal standard here, most of the furniture on the market today supports at least 300 pounds of user weight, with many products supporting substantially more. The R7 doesn’t quite rise to that level, and unfortunately, if you weigh more than that, it’s going to be a deal-breaker.

We like that the chair is offered in three different colors, too. It makes it relatively easy to blend the R7 with whatever color scheme you’ve got going on in your living room. A nice touch and another nod in favor of Titan’s design team.

On the other hand, we’re not a huge fan of the pleather upholstery. Although that’s not an uncommon upholstery choice at all, even in much more expensive chairs, so we can’t really count that against the R7. Just know that it’s not all that durable and will start showing its age after 18 months to two years, no matter how careful you are with it.

One final note to make here before we leave this section is the fact that the footwells can extend by as much as 6”. This chair is useful for people ranging in height from about 5’ to 6’4”, provided you don’t run afoul of the relatively modest weight limit, of course.

Stationary Massage Rollers

This is an important component of our AmaMedic R7 review and one of the points of weakness in the chair’s design.

Rather than having a massage track, it utilizes eight rollers that don’t move on a track at all but rather spin in place to render their massage.

The decision to do this is interesting but also somewhat limiting. First, most chairs that don’t rely on massage tracks use stationary heads that vibrate. The massage you get from a chair like that isn’t very good. 

The R7 is a cut above these because it features rollers. The spinning action is more or less the equivalent of the “rolling” massage technique you see on proper massage chairs with an actual track.

Unfortunately, since the rollers don’t move up, down, left, or right and merely spin in place, the quality of the massage you can get from a chair like this is limited. If the rollers happen to hit the pressure points in your back, you can get a decent massage from the chair. If they don’t, however, there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Based on the positioning of the rollers, the massage you get from this chair roughly approximates what you’d get from a massage chair with an S-Track. That is to say that the highest rollers are at neck/shoulder level, and the lowest rollers should hit the small of your back. 

However, there are no rollers in the seat, so you will not get a massage of your glutes or thighs with the R7.

No Body Scanning Tech Included

This will be a short section because there’s literally nothing to talk about here. Since there’s no massage track and the rollers don’t move, there’s no need to include a body scanning tech in the chair.

The good news is that it helps to keep the price low. The bad news is, as we discussed above. The rollers may or may not hit the spots you need them to hit.

More Massage Options Than You Might Think

This is another fairly important segment of our AmaMedic R7 review. Despite the fact that the rollers don’t move, the R7 does fairly well here, which is a credit to the Titan design team.

As we mentioned, the roller action is pretty much the equivalent of getting a “rolling” massage technique on a chair with a massage track. Via the remote, you can set the intensity of the massage via four different levels.

In addition to that, you’ll find six different preprogrammed massage routines here. These include:

Even better, via the remote, you can selectively activate only the rollers you want, choosing from the following options:

Sure, it’s easy to find other models with more to offer on this front, but for the money, this is an impressive array of options. The real limiting factor comes down to the fact that the rollers don’t actually move.

It’s Got Airbags Too!

In yet another nod to the Titan design team, the R7 sports an airbag-based massage too! Granted, it doesn’t have a ton of airbags (just sixteen all told), but that’s enough to allow the chair to deliver a decent airbag-based massage. Even better, you can choose between two different intensity levels. 

Just sit back and enjoy!

Lumbar Heat – Kinda

Only a minority of the chairs on the market today offer heat, which is a powerful therapeutic feature, and we were thrilled to see heat offered here. Granted, the heat function is somewhat limited, being centered in the lumbar region of the chair only. Still, the fact that it’s present at all is a huge win and yet another win for the Titan design team.

The implementation of this feature, however, is a bit unusual. Most of the time, when you see lumbar heat, you find a central heating coil located in the lower section of the seatback, and the heat radiates out from there.

In the R7, you’ll find two heating coils located closer to the outside edges of the seatback.

In our view, this is an inferior approach because if you have pain in your lower back, the odds are that the pain is centered on or near your spine, which is where you want the heat centered. This chair doesn’t provide that.

That’s not to say that the heat doesn’t provide any benefit; it does! It just doesn’t offer quite as much benefit as it should.

A Surprisingly Good Calf & Foot Massage

In addition to everything we’ve talked about so far, the R7 also offers a surprisingly good calf and foot massage. The calf massage is rendered via the airbags in the leg massage ports, while the foot massage is roller-based. Even better, you can adjust the intensity of the foot rollers via the remote through 4 different settings.

We would love to have seen the heat in the footwells, but honestly, that would be unheard of on a chair offered at this price point. As it stands, if you spend several hours of each day on your feet, this may well wind up being your favorite aspect of the chair. For the money, the foot massage feels very good and verges on being amazing.

A Surprising Number Of Extras Too!

Honestly, we weren’t expecting to see any extras or finishing touches at all. Still, again, the Titan design team pleasantly surprised us here as well. There are four different extras to talk about here.

First, you’ll find Bluetooth speakers built into the chair. Granted, they’re not the highest quality speakers on the market today, but they get the job done. Given the modest price of the R7, we were pleasantly surprised by their overall quality.

Second, in addition to the easy-to-use remote, you’ll find a control panel built onto one of the chair arms, allowing you to control the basic functions of the chair without actually digging your remote out.

Third, the R7 even has a massage timer, which allows you to set the duration of your chosen massage to either 15, 20, 25, or 30 minutes, at your preference.

Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, the R7 offers not one but two different Zero-G seating positions. Zero-G seating is inspired by NASA and works by reclining you to a position where your knees are elevated slightly above your heart. There are lots of great things about this, including but not limited to the fact that it:

These are impressive extras for such a modestly priced chair!

Pros & Cons of Amamedic R7 Massage Chair

At this point in our AmaMedic R7 review, you might be wondering why we led by saying that we couldn’t recommend this model. After all, at nearly every turn, we’ve sung the praises of the design.

That’s true, and we are definitely impressed with what this chair has to offer. It’s very modestly priced, and it’s positively brimming with features, which is awesome.

For all the great features this chair has on offer, though, there are two major points of weakness that are just complete showstoppers:

First, the modest supported weight of the chair limits its appeal. Second, and no less important, though, is the fact that there is no massage track. Since the rollers can’t move, the quality of the massage you can ultimately get out of this chair is going to be, by definition, sorely limited.

Amamedic R7 Review Conclusion

As many things as the R7 has going for it, we can’t recommend it. The one (very narrow) case where it could get a provisional recommendation from us would be:

If both of those things are true and you weigh less than 260 pounds, you might get some good value from the R7. Outside of that very narrow band, though, you can find products that offer more value for the money.

Titan Massage did good work here and came up with a surprisingly solid design. It just doesn’t bring as much value to the table as other readily available options.

Other Options To Consider

Since we don’t recommend the R7, here are a couple of options you may want to consider that are comparably priced:

This is the massage chair that the R7 wants to be, and the 6800 is one of the best values on the massage chair market today. It’s brimming with high-value features and offers the best body stretch in the industry. An amazing chair.

This is a shockingly modestly priced, insanely good chair, provided that you don’t have any specific therapeutic need you’re looking to address. For a hobbyist, a casual user, or someone who just wants to help loosen up those knotted muscles after a hard day’s work, this little chair is amazing.

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Osaki Manufacturer Support | Titan Manufacturer Support

References & Resources:

• Titan Message Chair, Official Brand Website.
• AmaMedic R7 Massage Chair User Manual.
• Adults Demonstrate Modified Immune Response After Receiving Massage, Researchers Show, Science Daily.
• Clinical Outcomes and Cost-Effectiveness of Massage Chair Therapy Versus Basic Physiotherapy in Lower Back Pain Patients, The Medicine.
• The History of Heat Therapy, Sunbeam.