The Onvi Prophix video toothbrush lets you spot-check your dental care

By Mike Epstein June 28, 2016

Have you ever wondered what your teeth looked like while you’re brushing them? Well wonder no more. Dental care start-up Onvi has created a toothbrush that lets you scope out your teeth as you brush them by watching a live video on your phone.

“[The Prophix] is going to empower people to take better care of their health,” said Onvi founder Dr. Craig S. Kohler. “It’s a system that’s designed to work with their dental health professional to … do a more thorough job because they can see what’s going on in their mouth.”

The Prophix is not the first smart toothbrush. In fact, there’s a whole wave of them either on the market or coming soon. They are all based on a similar proposition; by connecting your toothbrush to a smartphone app — iOS only for now, but the Android app is on the way — your toothbrush will be able to get more data on how you brush, which can help users and their dentists take better care of their teeth. Where many of the connected brushes, including a Bluetooth-enabled model by Oral-B, simply projects user brushing data on a chart, the Prophix lets you modify and spot clean your teeth based on what’s actually there.

The difference is a matter of immediacy: Tracking data on brushing your teeth is only useful if you study it. With Prophix’ feed, you can attend to the spots you might have missed the moment you notice them. While you can’t record and save the entire video through the app, it is possible to snap a picture of any trouble spots to share with your dentist.

In addition to the standard electric toothbrush, the Prophix comes with interchangeable heads that offer other dental tools, such as a mirror, a prophy cup that cleans under the gum line, and a rubber gum stimulator tip. There’s an expanded bundle that also adds a “scaler” for removing plaque from your lower front teeth. If the prospect of using all those tools seems daunting, that’s OK: The Prophix tracks your brushing and offers tips on how to brush more effectively.

The Prophix toothbrush is expected to ship to pre-order customers in the first quarter of 2017.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Michael is a New York-based tech and culture reporter, and a graduate of Northwestwern University’s Medill School of…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.