Smart toothbrushes have been around for a few years now and have yet to really catch our attention. However, with the amount of AI and tracking features Oral-B has packed into this toothbrush their time might be coming – though probably not.
One of the best things about fitness trackers, like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, is how they keep a track of your activity and allow you to easily look back and see how well you have performed. Oral-B is doing something similar with this iO toothbrush.
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Thanks to a smartphone app you can keep track of how long you brush for each day – complete with a smiley or sad face depending on if you hit the magical 2 minute mark – and even see how much of your mouth you’ve brushed. You’ll get a daily ‘brush score’ too, along with handy hints of how to improve your score. For instance, during my demo with the brush the app suggested I needed to cover far more of my mouth.
App aside, this is a smart brush in other ways too. There’s a small display on the front of the brush that’ll show you a countdown timer and allow you to easily switch modes while the switch to a Linear Magnetic Drive motor gives you a quieter brush that Oral-B told me should be more effective at cleaning.
Another neat feature is a light ring just below the brush head that’ll change colour depending on how hard you’re brushing: blue means you need to press harder, green is just right and red is too hard.
The brush itself looks fairly nice too, with a smooth body that comes in either a dark blue or a more traditional white and a neat docking station. It’s hardly breaking the mould of what I would expect from an electric toothbrush but it won’t look out of place in your bathroom and it doesn’t overly screen ‘smart’.
Oral-B isn’t releasing any pricing details yet and you won’t actually be able to buy the iO until August. We can’t imagine this will come cheap though and whether or not this will actually signify a more positive future for these smart kind of toothbrushes remains to be seen.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
