In Asian culture, taking off your shoes when you enter someone’s home appears to be a rather common practice. In some cultures like Japan, it goes even further as there are instances where you will have to take off your shoes when entering into a restaurant. This means that if you don’t practice good hygiene, there’s a good chance your feet will stink.
However as expected in Japan, they have an answer for that and it comes in the form of a cute robotic puppy. Created by Next Technology, this is a robotic puppy that could pass off as a soft toy, but it comes equipped with odor sensors that will be able to sniff the feet of people and when it detects what it determines to be a bad smell, it will bark.
In fact it will actually temporarily “faint” and roll out if your feet smell particularly bad. It will also release a burst of air freshener which will for the moment alleviate the situation. According to a Next Technology employee Kimika Tsuji, it seems that the robotic puppy was inspired by a request from a man who wanted to know if his feet smelt.
According to Tsuji, “He told us his daughter had said his feet were smelly . . . But he didn’t want to know how bad the odor was because he would feel hurt. That’s why we developed this cute robot.” The robotic puppy is expected to go on sale early next year where it will retail for a whopping ¥100,000.
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