Dentists usually recommend using the fancy, $100 toothbrushes that have motors, Bluetooth, and an app store. For most people, these are out of reach, either because of fiscal insecurity or because there are cooler things to buy with a $100. We wanted to investigate how we could provide help with brushing while staying strictly within the confines of the cheap $1 disposable toothbrush and an everyday item: a smartphone.

What it does

BrushBrushRevolution uses the webcam of the person's device to "lock on" to the color of a person's toothbrush. From there, it tracks the x-position, y-position, and velocity of the brush. We use some fancy, behind the scenes, math to derive the z-position, acceleration, quadrant of the mouth and other helpful data.

We developed two example places to pipe this data - but this data could easily be opened via an API to let users put it in Apple HealthKit or let developers create other apps.

Brush Hero

As a child, we all brushed less than the recommended 2 minutes just because brushing is boring. We hoped to make it exciting by having children brush in rhythm. We only demoed quarter notes but that could easily be replaced with a Let It Go or whatever the child wants.

Brush Hero also includes a monster fighting component. We developed an algorithm that rates brushing on a 1-10 scale in three categories (taken directly from the scientific literature): did they brush 2 minutes, was the brush at a 45 degree angle and did they spend roughly 30 seconds in every quadrant of the mouth. The higher the score is, the smaller the monster gives. Since the algorithm contains a time component, the real goal is to manage your quality/sec. That forces kids to get that 45 degree angle and brush for the full 2 minutes.

Analytics Software

While Brush Hero is fun, we also provide a more buttoned up analytics software. It rates your brushing and provides indications where you brush the most.

How we built it

We developed the tracking software with a lovely library called tracking.js. The process behind developing tracking started with a basic "can it recognize a specific color" but quickly multiplied in complexity. Colors are not consistent to a camera (even if it was looking for a unicolor object, which was basically not the case) over time so we developed more and more complex calibration algorithms that would look for the correct color.

Once we told tracking.js what to look for (usually a neon band we wrapped around the brush), it would show us with a little rectangle on screen what it was "looking" for. We exported that data for use in both

Challenges we ran into

We constantly faced calibration issues. We chose to use tracking.js's color detection features because it involves less matrix math on our end than detecting the edges. The problem is colors change over the day (especially with all the natural light in here) and, more disconcertingly, they change with hardware. We did our best to make our app compatible witn as much as we could from a Nexus 6P to an iPhone 7 to an old 2 megapixel webcam.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Brush Brush Revolution

Built With

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