Your twice-daily brushing and flossing routine could someday be automated using tiny microrobots that scrub your teeth for a customized clean, thanks to new research from the University of Pennsylvania.
"It could be perfectly aligned teeth or misaligned teeth," says study author Hyun Koo, DDS, founding director at the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania."It will work in either case because they can adapt to different surfaces, different nooks and crannies."
"It's such a basic material," says study author Edward Steager, PhD, a research investigator at Penn Engineering."It's not even a necessarily fancy material."The team is packaging the technology into a consumer-friendly prototype, which they hope to have ready within a year. But they will likely need a few more years of testing before the robots are ready for commercial use.
"We started with persons with disabilities or an older geriatric population, but I think at the end of the day, we want this to become available for everyone," says Koo."The whole technology of dental plaque control has not been disrupted for, say, centuries," Koo says.