Hey, it’s Jon from Electric Teeth here.
Oral-B make a number of different toothbrushes,
many of which fall under the banner of ‘smart’ or Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes.
A select few of these toothbrushes have sensors built into the brush handle that help
track the position of the toothbrush when in use.
This data is stored by the toothbrush and sent to Oral-B’s smartphone application,
available for iOS and Android devices.
The data will highlight areas of the mouth you have brushed
well and others where more attention is needed.
The idea being that this infromation can be reviewed to help you become better at
cleaning all the teeth in the mouth and ultimately improving your oral hygiene.
Where you might start out only achieving a 50% coverage, after days or weeks of use you can
achie much higher coverage scores. This is because you have leant what improvements you need to make.
Although data is stored for post brushing review, it is really designed to be most useful
when using the Oral-B smartphone application at the same time as you brush.
This means that you can take corrective action immediately.
With the brush connected to your phone, you will be able to begin brushing.
On screen you will see what are 2 rows of teeth.
You have those in the upper arch of the mouth and then those in the lower.
As you clean them the dull blue colour gradually turns to a bright white.
Unless all are bright white, you haven’t cleaned all the teeth thoroughly.
Whilst you don’t need a smart toothbrush like
this to be able to clean the teeth well, some will benefit from it.
But, although there are a number of toothbrushes that have real-time tracking
like this, the level of detail in the tracking can vary from one toothbrush model to another.
I don’t think the differences are explained all that well by Oral-B
and that is the reason for creating this video.
For example, at the time of recording, the iO Series 6,
7, 8 and 9 all offer real-time tracking and feedback on your toothbrushing.
But, only the Series 9, offers what Oral-B calls 3D teeth tracking.
The fundamental difference here is that the iO Series 9 is monitoring
16 different zones compared to the 6 zones of the iO Series 6, 7 and 8.
Shown on screen now are screenshots of the Oral-B
app for a brush with 6 zone tracking and one with 16.
You will see how the brush with 16 zone tracking, shown on the right,
has an extra visual in the centre of the screen.
The dotted lines relate to the 16 different zones. As each zone is cleaned, the visuals fade away,
and the corresponding teeth get gradually whiter.
Breaking the mouth up into different zones, makes it easier to understand how well we are brushing.
Each tooth has 3 surfaces, the front, the inside and the biting surface.Although
biting surfaces of the front teeth are usually disregarded due to the smaller surface area.
All of the zones in the mouth need to be brushed, with the correct technique
and for the right to achieve a through clean of the teeth.
What surfaces are included within each zone depends on how the brush and app configuration.
The 6 zones that are tracked by some brushes are:
Upper rear right Upper front
Upper rear left Lower rear right
Lower front Lower rear left
And the 16 tracked zones are as follows. Upper rear right, front inside & biting surface
Upper font, front and inside surface Upper rear left, front inside & biting surface
Lower rear right, front inside & biting surface Lower front, front and inside surface
And lower rear left, front inside & biting surface Note how with 16 zone or 3D teeth tracking,
it is assessing and reporting specific tooth surfaces. Compare this to 6 zone
where it is essentially combining the front, inside and biting surface into one zone.
Now, when getting real-time brushing feedback, the 16 zone tracking is much more useful,
because it is specific to a particular tooth surface
such as upper rear right biting surface, rather than just upper rear right.
This allows you to take corrective action where it matters.
Whereas if you were told to just brush better in the upper rear right, you may focus more attention
on the front and inside surfaces, which you were already doing a good job of cleaning, but still
fail to properly clean the biting surface because you didn’t get the specific feedback you needed.
If you want the most capable real-time tracking
and feedback from your toothbrush, those models with 16 zone tracking are better.
But, you can still gain valuable insights from those with just 6 zone tracking,
you just need to be aware that there is a limitation to the feedback given.