What Is Special About the Oral-B Genius 9000 Electric Toothbrush?

The Oral-B Genius 9000 has all the features consumers have come to expect in an electric toothbrush. It has a massage feature to stimulate the gums. It has a tongue cleaning mode. It has a slower speed for sensitive teeth. However, this model borrows technology from smartphones to help users brush better.

Frank Kressmann, the P&G engineer who developed the Oral-B Genius 9000, and his design team fitted the new electric toothbrush with accelerometers. These are the same devices that your smartphone uses to determine whether it is being held upright or is lying on a flat surface. The accelerometers detect motion in three dimensions and can calculate the angle of the toothbrush within a few degrees. 

The accelerometers, however, do not tell the user which parts of the mouth have been cleaned. For this, the users take a suction cup (which comes with the electric toothbrush) to stick their smartphones to the bathroom mirror. Users have downloaded an app which takes advantage of the phone's camera and facial recognition technology to measure the position of the brush relative to the mouth. The smartphone displays which parts of the mouth have been brushed sufficiently and which parts still need work. "It's almost like having your dentist with you in the bathroom," Kressman has said.

What's not to love about the Oral-B Genius 9000?

For most of us, the problem is the cost. You might be able to find an Oral-B Genius 9000 on EBay for as little as $140, but most retailers will charge $190 or more (plus tax, shipping, and handling). Many people simply can't afford to spend $200 to $300 a year per family member on electric toothbrushes, although it's easy to spend a lot more than than at the dentist's office if you don't brush properly.

READ Are You Brushing Your Teeth All Wrong?

One of the best alternatives to an Oral-B electric toothbrush is an Oral-B manual toothbrush. It has critically useful features that you just won't see on other toothbrushes:

• An Oral-B manual toothbrush has tufts at a variety of angles that make sure that you lift food particles off your teeth.
• The bristles on an Oral-B manual toothbrush reach into the space between your teeth and your gums just a little deeper than most other toothbrushes, helping remove food particles where they are especially prone to feed the bacteria that cause tooth decay.
• The bristles on an Oral-B manual toothbrush aren't inserted into the brush straight up and down. They are placed at a 16 degree angle from vertical so that they can more completely reach places around the tooth even if the toothbrush is held at a 90 degree angle to the tooth.

And an Oral-B manual toothbrush only costs $1.33 and up.

If you have trouble getting your kids to brush their teeth properly, an Oral-B Genius 9000 and a smartphone may be just what is needed to make oral hygiene fun. If you keep having to have plaque removed from the same places every time you see the dentist, the Oral-B Genius may be exactly what you need to refine your tooth brushing technique. This electric toothbrush isn't cheap, but if it saves you even one major dentist bill, it's more than paid for its cost.