Technology is changing every aspect of our lives and apparently tooth brushing is no exception. Amabrush, the world’s first automatic toothbrush promises to clean your pearly whites in just 10 seconds, with no effort required on your part.
You may never have thought about it before, but you lose tens of hours a year just brushing your teeth. A team of biotech engineers and dental care visionaries want to change that with the help of technology. Their seemingly-revolutionary invention, called Amabrush, looks more like a rubbery mouth-guard than a toothbrush, but promises to clean all your teeth thoroughly, in only 10 seconds, using vibrations created by a small motor, rather than repeated hand motion.
Amabrush consists of two major components – a soft mouthpiece that goes into your mouth, and a “handpiece” that contains the motor and a micro-pump. The mouthpiece is made of antibacterial silicone that allegedly kills 99.99% of bacteria, all by itself. But that’s not all. The flexible mouth-guard-like device also dispenses bespoke toothpaste through a series of micro-channels, and is lined with soft bristles that clean your teeth all at once. All you have to do is press a button on the handpiece and just wait 10 seconds for the device to do all the work. Once it’s done, you can rinse your mouth as you usually do.
The automatic toothbrush uses special toothpaste capsules that connect to the handpiece. They cost $3.40 and are supposed to last about a month, if you use the Amabrsh two times a day. Like normal toothbrushes, the silicone mouthpiece should be changed every 3 – 6 months, for optimal results. The price for a replacement is $7.
To create the silicone mouthpiece, the makers of Amabrush analyzed 2,000 jaws of both men and women, to come up with a once size-fits all design. They claim that any small differences in jaw size are smoothed out by the soft material, so the device fits any jaw with no abnormal teeth displacements.
The Amabrush handpiece, which contains a motor and a micro-pump for the toothpaste, “creates strong vibrations with an amplitude of 9.5G to oscillate the bristles and clean your teeth. A clever algorithm ensures the generation of different vibrations. This results in a coordinated movement of the bristles, which are designed to have different resonant frequencies.”
The device requires charging, but the good news is that a single charge is supposed to last for 28 brushing session, which comes out to about two weeks of two daily uses. It also comes with a low-energy wireless charging module (Qi), which means you can also use your smartphone’s wireless charging station.
“Amabrush can brush your teeth in just 10 seconds, because all your teeth are cleaned simultaneously,” the creators of the device claim. “Even in this 10 seconds, every tooth surface is cleaned longer compared with common toothbrushes. If you brush your teeth for the recommended 120 seconds with a regular toothbrush (manual or electric), every surface gets brushed for just 1.25 seconds (given the fact that you have 32 teeth and every teeth has three surfaces). Amabrush brushes all your surfaces for whole 10 seconds. This means: every tooth surface gets brushed 8x longer and the total toothbrushing duration is 12x quicker.”
People have apparently been waiting for something like this, because Amabrush reached its crowdfunding goal of €50,000 in just one hour. With 25 days tog until deadline, it has already managed to raise a whopping €710,000 ($808,000).
The Amabrush will be commercially available, for a price of $90, in December 2017.
