Oral-B Genius X: Company reveals electric toothbrush with AI that will coach you on cleaning your mouth

New brush knows where it is in your mouth – and where it should be

Artificial intelligence has become something of a dull buzzword: like the internet of things, 5G, and foldable phones, it's a label that supposedly means so much for the world that it has ended up meaning very little. AI is everywhere, its proponents claim – if it's not somewhere already, then it's about to be.

And the latest place it has arrived is perhaps the most personal yet: in your mouth. Oral B's latest toothbrush hopes to bring the power of AI and machine learning to your teeth, using artificial intelligence to coach you into brushing your teeth better.

It's not the first toothbrush to use technology usually preserved for mobile phones and other gadgets to make sure your brushing is as effective as possible. But Oral-B thinks it is the smartest, and the brush has a fitting name: the Genius X.

The toothbrush was revealed in Barcelona this week at Mobile World Congress, an event usually focused on phones. This year, many of the exhibitions focused on foldable handsets and 5G.

Oral-B staked its claim not only on the basis of its smart toothbrush but also its general vision of the future of healthcare and its connection to dental hygiene. That vision included a full-scale smart mirror, which could be controlled by people's hand movements and showed information about the day to come and the overall health of the person using it.

Oral-B does already have a toothbrush that relies on some smart features: the Genius. That too operates as a brushing coach as well as a brush itself, watching how you clean your teeth and encouraging you to avoid bad habits and ensure your entire mouth is brushed.

To know where it is, the toothbrush uses built-in sensors that build on a host of experimental work to understand how people brush. The company put huge numbers of people in front of a camera and asked them to brush, feeding that information into an algorithm that allows the toothbrush to know where it is, no matter which of the widely varying ways of brushing their teeth that people use.

But it does so using your phone's camera, meaning that you have to stick a special holder to your mirror and then stick your phone inside. When it's there, it can watch the brush as it moves around in your mouth, monitoring where exactly you are brushing and where needs extra work.

That is a rather complicated process that requires a fairly complicated process just to brush your teeth, and might not always work if the phone doesn't have the right view. Instead, the Genius removes some of that: it just needs to be within Bluetooth distance of your phone, and then will relay information that is displayed on your handset.

In the app – which was available to use at MWC, in a booth that let visitors brush their teeth – all of that information is displayed. Brushers are given a score, which factors in whether they press too hard and how long they brush for as well as how effective and complete their coverage was.

Over time, people are encouraged to improve that score by better brushing their teeth. Those scores can be viewed historically through the app, which also keeps data on things such as how often your gums bleed.

The Genius X is due to be released later this year and pricing has not yet been announced.