#AI in Oral Hygiene: Your Personal Dentist

In the recent year, several studies have shown the close relationship between oral health and overall health. Maintaining good oral health not only ensures a healthy mouth, but plays an important role in prevention and control of chronic conditions, leading to a healthier life. Indeed, the pandemic has increased people’s interest in their health and further empowered them to proactively seek out ways to improve it. Despite the surge of interest in preventative oral healthcare since the onset of the pandemic, studies show that people have been slow to return to the dental chair.

A recent survey reports that 67% of Americans are worried about the negative long-term health consequences of delaying routine dental appointments. Data from the CDC shows that about 47% of adult US population suffers from some form of severe gum disease. For those 65 and older, prevalence of severe gum disease increases to 64% percent.  

Inadequate brushing skills, non-compliance with oral-hygiene regimen and insufficient brushing are among the top three reasons that most people despite best efforts fall behind on maintaining their oral health.

More than 3 years ago we took up the challenge to address these issues with the introduction of our first Smart Toothbrush, the Philips Sonicare Diamond Clean Smart with the accompanying app that detects where a user is brushing in real-time and guides them to brush more completely and with the appropriate technique.

We have now taken that a step further with the introduction our latest offering Philips Sonicare Prestige 9900, to provide the best oral health to our consumers and disrupt the category by redefining the use of sensors and artificial intelligence in learning about the user's brushing habits and styles, to generate insights and provide recommendations in real time and also offline post brushing.

Philips has trained a deep learning model that can predict with high accuracy, the amount of time users spend brushing in a given zone of the mouth and how the insights generated from this application empower users by providing them with personalized reports. Our custom neural network model can predict which of 12 zones a user brush and for how long with ~90% accuracy even post brushing. Trained with hybrid sources of data, the model is robust to a wider variety of brushing cases, including head-movements and different styles of toothbrush handling, against which many existing models are not very robust.

This high accuracy AI model in combination with the Sonicare app, can now provide reports of past brushing tendencies and actionable recommendations on how to brush more effectively and remedy sub-optimal brushing habits.

I am excited to be sharing more insights into our work on developing this custom AI model at the nVIDIA GTC 2021 on Apr 12th 2021. Tune in at 10.00am PST at the link to learn more.

#deeplearning #datascience #artificialintelligence #analytics #ai #machinelearning #oralhealthcare #telehealth #teledentistry