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Team of Dentists Create "The Six-Second Toothbrush"
dryriver writes "A team of dentists has created a toothbrush they say can clean teeth thoroughly in less than six seconds. Manufacturer Blizzident uses the same scans dentists use to fit braces and an extremely precise 3D printer to create a brush for each individual customer. Each brush contains about 400 soft bristles and requires the wearer to grind their teeth in order to clean. Its makers say it eliminates brushing errors that people typically make, but experts say more research is needed. The technology comes at a price — a customer's first brush, which will last for a year, costs 299 euros ($405; £250). Subsequent brushes are cheaper, and old ones can be reconditioned for less than 100 euros, the company says. 'Because you are brushing all your teeth at the same time, you are brushing extremely quickly,' the company says. 'You brush all the difficult-to-reach and interdental regions without even having to think about it.'"
I predict that this item will show up very shortly for around $100 in SkyMall magazine...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If this is shown to work, I will buy it immediately.
A six-second sound byte of the London Symphony rendering Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life", with volume automatically adjusted to be heard above the brushing, is available at extra cost.
done to determine whether this type of brush is effective, or more specifically, whether it is MORE effective than brushing with a standard manual or electric brush. At that price, it better be MORE effective.
This is odd, but I have been considering a device like this for several months now. Except, if I were to do it, the bristles would move like a sonicare brush, instead of having to grind your teeth around to clean them.
You just have to pop the device in, let it run for 10-30 seconds, and your teeth are clean, and it could even floss for you.
Guess that will be next year's model . . .
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Just chew on this for six seconds...
http://img1.etsystatic.com/005/0/6262900/il_fullxfull.399675811_ozpd.jpg?ref=l2
Sounds pretty ground-breaking. Six second from the recommended 120 seconds--and how many of us do that?--is a lot of time saved, and if the device cleans our teeth better than we normally do (needs verification as noted above), that's a net win there too. Given the market for teeth whiteners and electric toothbrushes, there's certainly a social premium placed on attractive teeth, not to mention the very important health benefits of consistent dental care.
An EU company says you only need to brush for six seconds....
If this does what it says it does, the cost they cite is negligible. Although I wonder if fluoride ions take longer than six-seconds to work their magic. i'm still waiting for ultra-sonic tooth re-growing technology to be approved here in my United States.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It doesn't necessarily have to be more effective. If it's equally effective there are probably a number of people who will buy it just because it's interesting and saves them maybe one minute of time every day.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Hygienists hate them!
Multi-core parallel processing comes to toothbrushes!
Let the one-upmanship begin! Can anyone say "razor blades"?
Does this mean trolls teeth get cleaner due to surface areas being easier to access? Should I roll a troll for better hygiene?
If we do heroic brushing runs will we get epic gum lines?
Will it be a bad thing if a good tooth drops?
Can I rez a molar to avoid an extraction?
Will we be able to eat on Tuesdays, or will nutrition be down due to maintenance?
Should I just go ahead and plan to make my wisdom teeth shamans, priests and mages or are there options?
Subscription based MMORPG's (Molar-based Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are obviously the wave of the future. I can see Blizz changing the Headless Horseman to the Tooth Fairy this year.
I always felt that the "brushing" component of brushing was secondary to the fluoride present in the toothpaste, and six seconds of exposure sounds very minimal. However, I am not a dentist.
Getting ME to brush my teeth for even six seconds as a kid was an amazing feat.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
No thanks, I would rather use a Dentic - minty!
Just remember: *never* swallow one and they taste horrible fried - words to live by.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Between my Dr. Barman's Dental Woodsticks and my Reach Flosser I kinda doubt brushing everything at once will be that big an improvement. How big an imposition is the usual oral care rigmarole? Oh noes, the Phillips Sonicare takes a whopping two minutes to do its thing!
As someone who suffers from TMJ disorder the thought of deliberately grinding my teeth every day makes this idea a non-starter.
I'm guessing it works by creating tiny mass effect fields which remove plaque.
It'd save me five minutes a day. 45 minutes a week. Bad gums :-(
I'm thinking we could leapfrog this and go right to something that looks like standard sized mouthpieces. Inside the mouthpieces there would be no expensive customization. Instead, there would be mini-robots using sensors to detect the difference between gum tissue, exposed dentin, enamel, and plaque. The mini-robots would then scour the surface (or gently massage it) based on what they have sensed.
Get crackin' robot dentists. The only question is... would it actually be able to put the steel scraper ladies out of work? Yes they're people too; but I can't say I'd miss them.
Not sure about you but I think most people would gag if an object that size were to clean teeth for 6 seconds even in the way back of the mouth. Well, except of course that one girl we all know that can shove an animal balloons down her throat without gagging.
It's $435 for the first year, and $135 each year thereafter.
That's more than 50 times what I spend on toothbrushes in one year right now.
But it would only reduce my brushing time by about a factor between 15 and 25.
The economics are not worth it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I do. Strange as it sounds, it gives me a few minutes to think midday or just before bed. Furthermore, I thoroughly enjoy the 4 minutes I spend brushing my 2 year olds teeth.
Ugh.
01/01/01
so very very clever. Wrong, just like all the scorn heaped on "tin foil hats" was wrong, but oh so very clever. Without a doubt the most clever thing I have ever heard. You are going places, kimvette. Mark my words.
Another thing to consider: it may take 6 seconds to clean your teeth well, but how long does it take to clean the brush properly after it cleans your teeth?
Wouldn't you need more than 6 seconds to ensure that the chemicals in the toothpaste have taken hold?
Why would it take a while? Can't they find out how effective it is after each brush? Or is tooth decay and gum disease the only way to find out if it's working?
Surprised nobody has said they would buy this, though some could see the benefits. If it works as good as my electric (Oral B, one of those expensive ones with the charging base and the 30-second alert so you know to change quadrants) I'm all in. I hate brushing my teeth but do it pretty religiously, and if I can not do it for 2 minutes twice a day, sounds like a pretty good use of my money.
Someone else mentioned that they could brush easily after every meal and that seems a good idea as well. Also, whenever I don't brush it's because I'm late for somewhere. It's easy to say "Crap, I don't have time to brush" (even if it's a lie) when that time is 2 minutes sat in front of the mirror. Less so when it's 6 seconds you could presumably do while doing other things.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Who is in such a dire need of a quick brush that they need this? Is two minutes too much to spare these days?
Why, yes! I AM new here.
...recommended it to their patients.
It's not about the 2 minutes you save, but about the knowledge that you have properly brushed your teeth without missing a single spot every time you use this brush. It's easy to claim that more than half of the people that come into a dentist that need work done, end up there because they haven't brushed their teeth properly at least once a day for their entire life. You may not safe money on toothbrushes this way, but you will possibly break even on total dentistry costs even at the price point this brush is at now. It's not even about the money, having "perfect teeth" is a health and social benefit that has merit on it's own.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Fluoride has several functions when it comes to dentistry.
1) act as a catalyst for rebuilding teeth. It helps calcium and phosphates dissolved in your saliva to be (re)introduced in your teeth and rebuilds them that way. It does this by remaining in the porous surface of a tooth.
2) It acts as an antibacterial agent. Again, any bacteria it encounters will have trouble functioning and reproducing, slowing or killing the damage to your teeth. If your teeth are clean, there are very few bacteria in your saliva and after you flush, the only place where the fluoride will remain is in/on the surface of your teeth.
You don't need more than 6 seconds to apply fluoride to clean teeth using this brush system (or at least that is what they claim), or 120 seconds using a manual brush and it doesn't end when you flush your mouth after you're done brushing.
Fluoride has a function and it can help, but it's not what brushing your teeth is about. Cleaning the teeth and gums from debris and bacteria is the main purpose and doing this properly is way more important than applying some fluoride. You can add all the fluoride in the world, but bad cleaning won't be compensated with it. People that brush their teeth without even using tooth paste but do it properly, have way healthier teeth than people that do it badly but use high doses of fluoride. There are large portions of the world where tooth paste and fluoride are "extremely uncommon" to use to prove this.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's not. A summary is not plagiarism and you should go back underneath your bridge or maybe go complain that digg does the same thing for almost all of its posts. A summary doesn't need to be unique, it needs to make sense.
Now that's what I call "insightful" ! My Electric Shaver takes just a little less time than my manual Gillette 3 blade razor and then a full 15 Minutes to clean (I clean once every 3 days though, but still it's a big pain to open the 'foil' system and then use the brush to remove stuck hair bits from both sides of each of the 10-20 blades)
9 day week? not sure if trolling, or just dumb....
There was a joke in the Soviet Union that a shaving machine was displayed in a technology fair. All the man had to do was to insert his head in the machine and press a button, and the machine did the rest.
-"How amazing!", a bystander said. "Just think about this, every face has a different shape!"
-"Not after going through this machine!", the inventor replied.
is a mouthwash or chewing gum that could completely replace the brushing and flossing regimen. people don't need grossly overpriced toothbrushes... it's time to move beyond ~ 2000 year old tech.
The idea of a flossing version has occurred to me as well. A similar kind of custom-molded set of trays with floss strands.
Put it in your mouth and bite a couple of times and you floss your entire mouth.
I'm not sure how you'd change the floss without a complex re-stringing process, but maybe it could be strung with some kind of strong filament that could be easily cleaned and sterilized without needing to be changed.
But what happens when someone comes out with Five Second Teeth? Then you're in trouble...
Noooo NOT Five, I said SIX. No one's coming up with Five..Who brushes their teeth in five seconds?
I don't see how this devices brushes and rinses away debris. I see major problems with debris being forced into the gums, and it may be a killer flaw of the concept.
Otherwise I love the idea.
I'd buy it, because I can't seem to manage to use a brush regularly because it's such a pain in the ass for me to do so.
I avoided the dentist for about 5 years because each visit was more like a trip to a confessional, with lots of criticism and guilt about not flossing. I was brushing my teeth about twice a day and they said I absolutely HAD to floss. I would try flossing but it would be a 35 minute ordeal and there was just no way I was going to spend that much time every day doing that.
After a filling broke I knew I had to go to the dentist but rather than go back to the asshole I figured I'd look into sedation dentistry -- I was sure I had a bunch of work needed and didn't want to come back five times for long appointments.
I made an appointment and basically outlined my situation -- my teeth are a train wreck, I know I need a lot of work but I hate being badgered. I'm paying you to fix my teeth, not treat me like a criminal. And I'm just not going to floss, period. Don't ask, it won't happen. The dentist was very understanding and after two sedation sessions, 3 crowns, a root canal and several fillings I was back to normal.
Because my gums were in bad shape, he made me a set of trays -- basically molds of my teeth -- that he had me fill with a peroxide gel once a day for 5 minutes and put in my mouth. After 6 months of this my gums were healthy and as a side bonus, had bleached away a lot of the coffee and cigarette stains. The gel was a prescription thing, filled out of a pharmacy in North Dakota. The prescription lapsed on me and I didn't get it renewed and switched to using Crest Pro-Health (with CPC) dental rinse twice a day when I brushed (morning & night).
At my next appointment I didn't tell them I stopped using the trays and my gums were as healthy as ever. I've kept doing this and haven't had a cavity or any degradation of my gums since. I think a good dental rinse (with CPC or some other antibacterial) is really key to good oral health. Even after brushing and rinsing with water, I'm amazed at what gets dislodged when rinsing with a CPC mouthwash.
Looking at the pictures, I don't get how the device cleans the outside of your teeth. I honestly can't see this achieving mass market success for a few reasons. First, the price needs to come down - as a consumable item, people aren't going to want to blow a lot of money on it. Then there are issues with cleaning / hygiene - lots of crap can get stuck in those bristles. Then there's the risk involved - people aren't willing to risk their dental hygiene on an untested / unproven technology. For most people, this means a recommendation from their dentist / hygienist.
You sound like a happy Braun owner. Next time try a Panasonic: rub a bit of soap on the foil, run under water for 30 seconds while on, disassemble and let dry. Those shitty washing stations are such a waste of resources.
So, how much is 2 minutes worth to you. $400 for 6 seconds of your time, or $2 for 120 seconds of my time. I will choose the second option every time.
I still don't understand why this has to be custom fit to your mouth/teeth, since every part of brushing is handled by the bristles, why does it matter if it is formed perfect for your teeth? I imagine, like most other products, this could be sized up to a small, medium, or large, or even have a brush that could be trimmed off (with scissors, like a mouthguard, for instance).
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
$405 dollars? WOW!!! Quick! Where can I buy one!
What, do you just brush once a day?