Talise Spa starring the Human Regenerator

Even in its unexpectedly inanimate state, the Human Regenerator looks impressive - a 1960s-futuristic, human-size cigar tube that would be equally at home in an art gallery or on the set of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, starring as one of the hibernation pods on board Discovery One. And, as we sit around staring up at the stubbornly inactive device - not unlike the dumb hominids baffled by Kubrick's mysterious obelisk - it becomes apparent that the comparison can be stretched further. In 2001, Hal, the recalcitrant computer, switched off the life-support pods, killing three of the boffins therein. Now, someone - or something - has pulled the plug on the Human Regenerator.Cue the Sunrise fanfare from Richard Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It's a little disappointing. I've always been a sucker for gadgets, and this is the grand gadget of them all - Dh2.22 million worth of space-age technology, complete with light show, overhead star display and "soothing" new-age ambient sounds. Step in and off you go, first rotated gently backwards to the horizontal, and then exposed to... well, in the words of the maker, "a Quantum-Pulse-Device that imitates and generates the cellular body's natural frequencies ranging between 0.0005 and 38.000 Hz within a field intensity of less than 1 µT". What does all that mean? Who knows. But, dang! If only it were working! As miffed as I am not to be having my unsound cells regenerated, collagen production boosted, bio-energy regulated and immune system strengthened (to list a few of the claims made for this device), it's Evelin Costa, the marketing manager at Madinat Jumeirah's beautiful and holistic Talise Spa, that I really feel sorry for. After all, this machine - one of only two in the world currently available for public use - has been regenerating away for the past two years, without so much as a blown bulb. Why, Evelin even uses it herself twice a week - and did so even more during Ramadan: "We go to iftar and suhoor with clients, and we still need to be here at 8am, looking fresh, so before I turn on my computer I turn on the Human Regenerator." Thirty minutes in the machine - at a cost of Dh400, for Talise punters - "is equivalent to four hours of sleep", she says. Some people feel nothing; others, including her, "feel a tingling". Right now, however, none of us is feeling anything other than mildly irritated. Maybe the machine needs a rest - but did it really have to pick the week in which its inventor flies in from Germany, hoping to show it off to a journalist? Ily Guslo, the chief executive of the Bremen-based System4 Technologies, says his company has so far made 94 of the machines, of which the vast majority are in private hands. Other than this one in Dubai, and the one in the company's showroom in Bremen, Germany, you'd have to go to the Vitasport Wellness Club in Moscow to try one on for size. Though he thinks someone might have caused the breakdown by fiddling with the machine's power supply, Guslo can't fix it - he is, after all, an industrial designer, not a technician - and it's too early to contact one of his engineers in Germany. Instead, we sit around in the purpose-designed, blacked-out treatment chalet and he explains how the idea came to him. Back in 2007, his wife Monika had what appeared to be an incurable skin disease. They tried everything traditional medicine had to offer, he says, until finally "a specialist told us to think about alternative medicine". Enter Dr Reinhard Werner, billed on his CV as a "world leading Energy Medical Scientist", who offered to treat Monika with electromagnetic impulses. Guslo says he was "totally sceptical about alternative medicine" but his wife had reached the end of her tether. He asked her "if she wanted to play lab rat", and she said: 'Yes, I will do anything to be cured'."