Electric Toothbrush: Brush Your Teeth Like a Genius

Dentists constantly complain that their patients, even their adult patients, simply don't know the proper way to brush their teeth. Chances are that your dentist gently reminds you of proper teeth cleaning procedures every time you come in for a checkup. It's really not that hard:

• Brush twice a day,
• Every day,
• For at least two minutes, and
• Don't miss any teeth.

However, researchers for P & G (Procter and Gamble, the consumer products manufacturer) have found that the majority of people in the United States and United Kingdom:

• Brush once a day,
• Nearly every day,
• For less than minute, and
• Miss their molars.

The human mouth is home to about 500 species of bacteria. Many of these microorganisms can contribute to bad breath and tooth decay. If you don't open wide and brush all your teeth, all the way to the gum line, you leave a smorgasbord of decaying food on which bacteria can feast. They form plaque, which eventually crowds the gum away from your tooth, and creates even more nooks and crannies where food particles can accumulate and bacteria can have a field day rotting your teeth and producing noxious odors.

The bacteria that accumulate on your gums can find their way into your bloodstream. Much as they die and create plaque on your teeth, they can die and create plaque in your arteries. Poor dental care, it turns out, is a major contributing factor for heart disease.

Ever since Oral-B was founded by American periodontist Dr. Robert Hutson in 1949, dentists have focused on building better toothbrushes for better oral hygiene. They replaced hard bristles with soft bristles. They replaced straight-edged bristles with rounded bristles. They have created bristles that fade as they wear, so users know it is time to buy another toothbrush, and they have created electric toothbrushes that rotate an astonishing 8,800 times a minute. In recent years, however, dentists have realized that they need to help their patients with their technique in addition to providing them with better brushes.

READ Tooth Brushing Techniques for Better Oral Hygiene

What are the sorts of things that tell dentists that their patients usually lack good tooth brushing technique?

• Most dentists can tell with just a quick glance whether a patient is right- or left-handed. Most of us tend to brush one side of our mouths more thoroughly than the other (usually the side of the mouth opposite the hand in which the toothbrush is held).
• Most dental patients need to have plaque removed from the same places at every visit. That's because most of us brush our teeth on autopilot, without giving any thought to whether we're giving our teeth the complete cleaning they need twice a day.
• Most of us make an effort to improve our oral hygiene by brushing longer, which is a good thing. However, not only do we all need to brush our teeth for a full two minutes every time we brush, we also need to make sure we are brushing all our teeth.

The new Oral-B Genius 9000 uses ingenious technology to make sure users brush primary teeth, wisdom teeth, all their teeth the right way.

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.