Dental hygiene company Oral-B announced its Bluetooth-connected electric toothbrush line, SmartSeries, which will be available in Germany this spring and in the United States in June. The Oral-B companion app will be available in iOS in May, and in Android in August.
Oral-B will also add connectivity to some of its other electric toothbrushes.
SmartSeries will offer users six different brushing modes -- daily cleaning, deep clean, whitening, gum care, sensitive, tongue cleaning -- so that users can personalize their brushing experience with their dentist. The app starts a timer when the user begins to brush and leads the user through whichever brushing routine suits their needs and will immediately alert users when they apply too much pressure while brushing. Users can see a graphical view of their brushing performance over time.
"[Our Bluetooth connected toothbrush] provides the highest degree of user interaction to track your oral care habits to help improve your oral health, and we believe it will have significant impact on the future of personal oral care, providing data-based solutions for oral health, and making the relationship between dental professionals and patients a more collaborative one," Wayne Randall, vice president of Global Oral Care at Procter and Gamble, said in a statement.
Oral-B is the first prominent dental health company to come out with a connected toothbrush, but some smaller startups have been working on this technology for a few years.
The first connected toothbrush came out at CES 2013, Beam Technologies’ Beam Brush. The brush costs $24.99 and sends data about the user's brushing behaviors to a connected app. Beam Brush also gained FDA clearance in June 2012.
At this year's CES, another company, Paris, France-based Kolibree, launched a connected toothbrush. Unlike Beam Brush, which is a manual toothbrush, Kolibree's offering is electric. According to the company, the sensors in the brush detect not only how long you brushed your teeth, but also whether you hit all the hard to reach places between gums and teeth. The brushing data will also be available via an API, so third party developers can build games or other applications that use the smart toothbrush.
