Sestala publishes a standards comparison ahead of the EU's 2027 machinery rule

Europe, 17 September 2026 - Sestala today published a sourced comparison of the safety data available across the recovery category, four months before the European Union’s Machinery Regulation makes new requirements for machines that interact with people mandatory on 20 January 2027. The comparison sets out what the current standard requires a manufacturer to publish, what the most detailed public research on contact force actually measures, and where Sestala’s own published limits sit against both. It gives a partner, an insurer or a journalist one sourced table to check a safety claim against, instead of four separate documents.

EN ISO 13482:2014, the standard covering physical contact between a person and a service robot, requires a manufacturer to derive and validate its own force limit. It supplies no numeric threshold itself, and the standard says plainly that none was internationally recognised for this kind of contact when it was written.

The most detailed public research available to fill that gap was not built for it. Germany’s DGUV, the statutory accident insurance body, holds a register of roughly 9,000 pressure-pain measurements across 29 body locations, gathered to study accidental contact between industrial robots and factory workers, not a requested session where firm pressure is the point. It is genuine research, and a manufacturer drawing on it for a massage robot’s own ceiling is borrowing data built to answer a different question.

The regulatory clock is now running on its own schedule regardless of what any manufacturer publishes voluntarily. The EU’s Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 enters mandatory application on 20 January 2027, replacing the current directive with updated requirements for machines that interact with people. It will not retroactively fix a spec sheet printed before that date, but after it, “we comply with the previous directive” stops being a sufficient answer on its own.

Sestala’s own published limits sit in the comparison as one line, not as its subject: a 70 N force ceiling, a 40°C thermal ceiling at the contact surface and a stop response of 450 milliseconds, already listed at sestala.com/industry. The company is not publishing a new number today. It is publishing where the existing numbers - the industry’s, its own and the regulator’s - sit next to each other for the first time.

“A category is easier to trust when the gap between what’s required, what’s researched and what a regulator is about to change sits in one table instead of three separate documents,” said Jörg Olbing, founder. “We are not the subject of this comparison. We are one line in it, and we would rather be checked than trusted.”

The figures, for reference:

• EN ISO 13482:2014 sets no numeric force or pain limit for contact between a person and a service robot; each manufacturer derives and validates its own
• DGUV’s pressure-pain register: roughly 9,000 measurements across 29 body locations, built to study industrial-robot contact, not a massage session
• EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230: mandatory application from 20 January 2027
• Sestala’s own published limits: 70 N force ceiling, 40°C thermal ceiling, 450 ms stop response
• Markets: Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom; first studios open 2027

Sestala builds and runs precision recovery - machine recovery sessions delivered to a standard its founder would lie down on himself.