Whenever Dyson enters a new product category, a ripple effect usually follows, with the buzz growing so loud that competitors are forced to react. The company did this with stick vacuums and premium hair dryers. Now it’s aspiring to upend the oral care business.
On Tuesday, Dyson announced the CameraJet, a two-in-one electric toothbrush and flosser, to help you clean those pearly whites. It’s not the company’s first hybrid experiment (that would be the short-lived Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones), but as a pairing of two technologies, this makes far more practical sense—even if the word camera isn’t one you’d typically expect in the name of an oral device.
The CameraJet is an electric toothbrush with an embedded flosser that shoots liquid into the gaps between your teeth as you brush. How does the device know when the brush head is right above a gap that needs blasting? A built-in endoscope camera analyzes 28 images per second, shooting bursts of rinse as you move the device over your teeth.
Dyson calls this the Gap Optical Targeting system. The company says it’s powered by a macro-lens camera and a machine learning algorithm trained on 470,000 dental images that Dyson collected during the six years it spent developing the product. Dyson says the magic happens within 100 milliseconds—the camera sees the gap and flushes it with a mouth rinse, all while you brush normally.
The fluid jet itself has some interesting engineering. Dyson notes that it’s a conical jet, which the company claims removes plaque more effectively than the “needle-type jets” used by competing stand-alone water flossers. Dyson says its cone-shaped jet of fluid can remove plaque over a wider area using less pressure, making the brush gentler on gums and enamel.
For testing this, Dyson created its own proxy plaque in collaboration with the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Dentistry. This allowed the designers to iterate and test the brush’s plaque-removing prowess in the lab without running a clinical trial after every minor change.
Right below the brush is a tank where the gadget stores 12.5 milliliters of alcohol-free mouth rinse. A diaphragm pump and pressure chamber ensure the jets shoot out no matter how you hold the brush, which Dyson claims gives the CameraJet an edge over its peers, which it says lose performance when tilted. A docking station refills the toothbrush with mouth rinse in three seconds with the touch of a button. It also recharges the CameraJet and gives it a nice resting place on your sink. There’s a travel case for packing the whole thing up.
Finally, we get to the bristle brush head. Dyson says it’s contoured precisely to reach a “greater proportion of the tooth’s surface,” with firmer inner bristles and softer outer bristles. A radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag inside measures how many cleans it has completed, so you’ll know exactly when to replace the brush head. There’s also a softer version of the brush head for people with sensitive teeth and gums.
Don’t forget the sonic oscillation! That’s a normal part of an electric toothbrush, where it vibrates side to side to clean your teeth. Dyson’s CameraJet uses variable sonic oscillation, which varies the angle of oscillation as you brush. The company says this design prevents the bristles from stalling under pressure.
All of this brings us to the CameraJet’s biggest claim: that it “removes up to 69 percent more plaque than market-leading premium electric toothbrushes in hard-to-reach areas.” (Dyson’s small print says this is based on laboratory tests in the brush-only variable mode in hard-to-reach areas.)
The CameraJet connects to your phone over Bluetooth (there’s also Wi-Fi support), where it will show up in the MyDyson app. You don’t need to open the MyDyson app to use the toothbrush. But if you do use the app, you can look through the brush’s camera in real time and watch the device shoot liquid into your tooth gaps. If you’re worried about putting a camera in your bathroom, Dyson says not to worry; the camera is active only when you open the live view through the MyDyson app or when the brush is automatically scanning your teeth to find the places to shoot those rinsing jets. The company says it does not record or store images locally on the CameraJet or in the cloud.
If you decide to use the app, you can get personalized feedback, coverage mapping to make sure you’re cleaning all your teeth, and even a guided cleaning mode. Also, if you don’t want the CameraJet to shoot its jets automatically, you can use the manual jetting mode.
There are two more things you should consider before bringing this tech into your bathroom.
Dyson products command high prices, and the CameraJet will unsurprisingly cost you a pretty penny: $499. It comes in blue and pink, and each CameraJet comes with a refill dock, two regular brush heads, and a charging cable.
The final catch is that you cannot use any old toothpaste and mouth rinse. Dyson has a proprietary “non-foaming” toothpaste coming soon, which is crucial, because foam will block the camera. The “low-foaming” rinse is also specifically designed to work with the entire system. You’ll be able to sign up for a Dyson subscription to get toothpaste, rinse, and replacement brush heads on a recurring basis. However, you can use any third-party rinses and toothpaste if they are sodium lauryl sulfate–free, as that substance causes foaming.
Around one in three adults in the US reports flossing daily, and multiple studies show that people often spend less than a minute brushing instead of the two minutes recommended by the American Dental Association. By combining brushing and flossing, Dyson is pitching that its product condenses two steps into one, though we’ll have to see if its camera-equipped brush can successfully blast those jets into just the right spots.
The post Dyson’s Next Act Is an Electric Toothbrush With a Camera appeared first on Wired.
