Whenever Dyson enters a new product category, a ripple effect usually follows, with the buzz growing so loud that competitors are forced to react. The company did this with stick vacuums and premium hair dryers. Now it’s aspiring to upend the oral care business.
On Tuesday, Dyson announced the CameraJet, a two-in-one electric toothbrush and flosser, to help you clean those pearly whites. It’s not the company’s first hybrid experiment (that would be the short-lived Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones), but as a pairing of two technologies, this makes far more practical sense—even if the word camera isn’t one you’d typically expect in the name of an oral device.
The CameraJet is an electric toothbrush with an embedded flosser that shoots liquid into the gaps between your teeth as you brush. How does the device know when the brush head is right above a gap that needs blasting? A built-in endoscope camera analyzes 28 images per second, shooting bursts of rinse as you move the device over your teeth.
Dyson calls this the Gap Optical Targeting system. The company says it’s powered by a macro-lens camera and a machine learning algorithm trained on 470,000 dental images that Dyson collected during the six years it spent developing the product. Dyson says the magic happens within 100 milliseconds—the camera sees the gap and flushes it with a mouth rinse, all while you brush normally.
Courtesy of Dyson
The fluid jet itself has some interesting engineering. Dyson notes that it’s a conical jet, which the company claims removes plaque more effectively than the “needle-type jets” used by competing stand-alone water flossers. Dyson says its cone-shaped jet of fluid can remove plaque over a wider area using less pressure, making the brush gentler on gums and enamel.
For testing this, Dyson created its own proxy plaque in collaboration with the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Dentistry. This allowed the designers to iterate and test the brush’s plaque-removing prowess in the lab without running a clinical trial after every minor change.
Right below the brush is a tank where the gadget stores 12.5 milliliters of alcohol-free mouth rinse. A diaphragm pump and pressure chamber ensure the jets shoot out no matter how you hold the brush, which Dyson claims gives the CameraJet an edge over its peers, which it says lose performance when tilted. A docking station refills the toothbrush with mouth rinse in three seconds with the touch of a button. It also recharges the CameraJet and gives it a nice resting place on your sink. There’s a travel case for packing the whole thing up.