Japan is a country that develops strange things, it has been doing so for decades, and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. Recently a company in the Land of the Rising Sun, created a robot that is capable of feeding runners tomatoes on the fly.
Japanese tomato-product manufacturer Kagome has a lot to gain from the success of this robot, but not much to lose if it fails. In all honesty, the product does look a bit dumb, but we can see where it makes sense when it comes down to nutrition for runners.
An employee for Kagome, who goes by the name Shigenori Suzuki, will run this weekend at the Tokyo Marathon, and he'll be wearing the tomato dispensing robot on his back. The robot is capable of holding up to 6 tomatoes, and will bring them one-by-one to the mouth of the wearer whenever he deems it fit. It means that while Suzuki is running, he can quench his thirst with tomato juice instead of water.
The only problem with the robot is that it weighs over 17-pounds, and we doubt everyone will be prepared to take on such a heavy undertaking. However, it would appear the company had figured this out, and thus it designed smaller versions that can hold bite-sized tomatoes, 12 of them to be precise.
Why tomatoes and not water?
For those who are unaware, tomatoes hold a lot of nutrition that are capable of combating fatigue. Eating tomatoes during a race should give the runner a boost over those who are drinking water, but one should not believe this just yet since there's no real scientific proof.
At the end of the day, while the idea makes sense, the machine at the moment is too bulky. The designers need to do more to make it smaller because not even the lighter version is good enough.
Chances are this device will take off in Japan and other parts of Asia, but one should not expect it to have success elsewhere. Many inventions from Japan actually make a lot of sense, but not everyone in Europe or North America would dare take advantage of these things because of how they look.
