Hello. I'm James Dyson, and I'm in the Bastille area of Paris. In 1789, there was a revolution here in la Bastille. So now, if you follow me, we may be looking at another very small revolution. Please follow me. We're going to reveal a new product today. There are a few hints around the walls of teeth and mouths. I'm very excited to show you this, and in a minute we'll reveal what it is I'm going to launch.
For ages, oral care has only touched the surface of what's possible. People spend just 45 seconds brushing, well below the two-minute guideline, and cleaning between the gaps is archaic—twisting string around our fingers and fumbling around blindly inside our mouths. Over 3.7 billion people suffer from oral disease, and worrying research links poor oral health to heart disease and even a heightened risk of Alzheimer's. Yet toothbrushing technology hasn't changed for over 40 years. Plenty of gaps remain. These problems have interested engineers and scientists at Dyson for many years. We needed to understand the intricacies of the mouth and, importantly, the interdental spaces where the problems start.
The new CameraJet™. Sorry about that. Now, the CameraJet™ is the first toothbrush with a camera, and the first toothbrush with the ability to find the space between the teeth and floss as you brush. The first thing it has is a camera. It's a 1mm x 1mm camera with a macro lens, and it films along your teeth as you brush. It has a light because obviously it's inside your mouth, it's dark, and it's got to be able to see in order to film properly. And it has what we call Gap Optical Targeting™. So it's no use firing blindly. You've got to find that space between the teeth where the plaque is developing, and we use, in our case, a jet to jet the plaque away.
And it's not always a gap. I mean, I did a little pun about the gap before I walked on, but sometimes the teeth are together and there isn't a gap you can see. So you have to understand the surface of the tooth and where the gap is going to be, and then know when to fire the jet. To help us with this, we have AI understanding the surface of the teeth, and absolutely knowing where the teeth are joining and firing at that point. And in order to help us do that, we've downloaded half a million images of teeth and about 16 million and counting lines of algorithms. There's a lens and the lens is dome-shaped. It's a special dome-shaped lens which shakes off the slurry and the water that's inside your mouth in order to get a clear photograph of what's going on.
Now, it's quite an important thing. When the toothbrush is working it's oscillating at 58,000 oscillations per minute. It's rather like getting your iPhone and shaking it as hard as you can and trying to take a film, and that's what the camera is trying to do. It's oscillating at this incredible speed yet managing to make a film. And it does that by operating slightly out of sequence with the oscillation of the head. And then it stitches together what it's seeing into a recognisable film. The jet is actually conical. This is really important because it needs to be conical to brush away the plaque. And you can see a needle jet, which competitor flossers use, actually punctures the plaque, the sticky substance, and didn't actually remove it. And the other advantage of the conical jet is that relatively softly it covers the whole tooth surface, whereas a needle jet is a rather nasty point load on your tooth—rather uncomfortable.
In order to develop the conical jet, we had to develop a proxy plaque so that we could do our experiments. And we developed the proxy plaque with the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Singapore. And indeed, there you see the proxy plaque on some teeth. Plaque is a sticky substance at first, and after about two or three days, it turns rock hard and the dentist needs a pickaxe to get it off. So we've used the proxy plaque in our testing with robots so that we have absolutely repeatable tests day after day. By the way, if anyone wants to borrow that robot, I think it would be quite a nice way of doing your teeth.
Now the mouthwash tank, obviously when I'm cleaning my teeth, I can put it upside-down or sideways. So it's what we call the anti-gravity tank. And the bladder inside presses out as the water is extracted, which means obviously it can operate at any angle. Now that compares with normal flossers where the tube can get out of the water if you turn them horizontal or upside-down, whereas our tank is an anti-gravity tank and it can operate at any angle, even upside down. The brush heads are replaceable, and they have an RFID tag, and the software will tell you in the app when you need a new brush. And also you can have an A and a B brush so that your partner can have one brush and you can have the other on the same toothbrush body.
We developed a very special bristle pattern, and there's a very interesting thing about brushing: the bristles can actually stall. So the bristle stays in the same spot and the bristle bends. So to overcome that we developed a variable oscillation. So instead of it stopping, we vary the oscillation, and the bristle can't actually stop in one spot. We have a dock—it comes with a dock—and the dock contains the mouthwash fluid. And you press a button and the pump refills in a couple of seconds. And it also charges on the dock. And it comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And the Wi-Fi is really important because it means you can put up your phone and watch your film of you cleaning your teeth. And it also tells you what you've missed. It tells you how well you've done it, how many hits you've got, and it compares one session with another session. It's a proper tutorial, which I hope will improve your teeth cleaning efficacy.
It's jetting under the gum line. It's knocking away the plaque as you brush so it never has a chance to form, and it's maintaining excellent oral health. So flossing as you brush is what you're doing with CameraJet™, and I've been doing it for quite a few months now. And now there will be a much more coherent presentation of what I've just done. So I'll see you in a moment.
