tokyomarathon
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Piggybacking robot feeds you tomatoes while you run
We might have a new winner for the "world's silliest wearable" award. Japanese juice vendor Kagome has teamed up with the mechanical artists at Maywa Denki to build Petit-Tomatan, a piggybacking robot that feeds you tomatoes (which reportedly help your "antioxidant power") while you're running. This goofy helper was meant as a publicity stunt for this weekend's Tokyo Marathon, but it's a fully fleshed-out device -- there's even a timer so that you don't clear out your nutritional supply too quickly. While you're likely never going to see any serious athletes donning contraptions like this, it does make the runner's old-school water bottle look a little outdated.
Wearable banana shows your heart rate and is still edible (sort of)
Cleverly folding in this weekend's Tokyo Marathon with the current appetite for fruit-named wearables, here's some advertising silliness from fruit moguls Dole: the wearable banana. Underneath the skin, there's an array of LEDS that beam out enough red light to scroll lap-time times, the runners' heart rate and even motivational tweets of support -- or you just send Bluth quotes, right here.
Man will run Tokyo Marathon with dizzying array of gadgetry, amazing lack of shame (video)
There are some activities that you'll simply never be able to get your friends to come along for, and for most groups of social cohorts running 26 miles certainly falls into the "you have fun with that" category. Some try to regale their friends with tales of burning lungs and fiery quads, but Joseph Tame has another solution. He's created the iRig, a curious contraption containing four iPhones, an Android device of unknown provenance, an iPad, three wireless routers, a weather station, a heart rate monitor, and a silly mock satellite dish up on his head. With all this he plans on livestreaming his entire race using Skype, FaceTime, Runkeeper, and a custom Android app that will send out atmospheric conditions -- according to Joseph doing "all this while looking incredibly cool." We can't argue with that, but we also can't help worrying about the chafing that contraption will induce. See for yourself in the video below.
