Clean your teeth in 10 seconds
Imagine only brushing your teeth for ten seconds – efficient and time saving or lazy? The manufacturers of a new type of electric toothbrush, which cleans all your teeth together, claim we could soon all be done with our brushing routine in a flash.
Developed by French startup Fasteesh, Y-Brush is shaped like a mouthguard, with a handle containing a battery and a motor, and fits over a whole row of teeth at once. You press the button to switch it on, let it clean your top teeth for five seconds, rotate it and clean your bottom teeth for the same amount of time. Done.
After raising more than £93,000 from backers on Kickstarter, Y-Brush is expected to go on sale in April.
Now, ten seconds might not seem very long to clean your
teeth, given that dentists recommend we do it for at least two minutes. But a
manual brush doesn’t clean all three surfaces of all 32 teeth at once. Fasteesh
says in vivo trials over a week in 2018 showed Y-Brush was as effective as
ordinary brushing.
A basic manual brush remains, of course, a highly effective way to clean your teeth, and two minutes is hardly very long. However, as Jon Love, founder of the Electric Teeth dental information website, puts it: “There are some crazy statistics about just how poor the standard of oral hygiene is.” A third of Americans, half of Australians and a quarter of the French don’t brush their teeth twice a day; the French only do it for on average 43 to 57 seconds, and a grubby ten per cent of them clean their teeth less than once a day.
To clean the Y-Brush, you just need to rinse it and you can use your normal toothpaste – it comes with an applicator to help you put it onto the mouthpiece. When not in use, it’s stored in a charger, like a cordless phone. Of course, this will mean British people can’t keep it in their bathrooms, as although the brush itself is wireless, the charger needs to be plugged in.
There are three different settings, depending on how sensitive your teeth are, and four sizes, catering for both adults and children. The brush is also highly portable – because it’s only used for ten seconds at a time, it can stay charged for a month.
Based in Lyon, Fasteesh manufactures healthcare products and was founded by Benjamin Cohen, formerly a clinical trial manager at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, and Christophe Cadot, a former research and development engineer at the Saint Gobain Recherche institute.
The team have been working on Y-Brush since 2016, and have developed a similar product for use in care homes, after their research revealed that elderly people and people with mobility difficulties were struggling the most with dental hygiene.
If your company is involved in developing new health care products, you could be eligible for the R&D tax credits scheme. As specialists in R&D claims, we can help you recoup money you’ve invested in research. Have a look at our r&d relief calculator and r&d tax credit examples to see how much you could be eligible for.