Encourage dental hygiene and proper brushing of teeth with exclusive short videos

Background:

According to the American Dental Association, the “general” recommendation is for people to brush their teeth for two-ish minutes, twice a day.

The Issue:

Two minutes is a long time! Maybe there’s some way to motivate people to brush their teeth for this long.

Proposal:

The incentive is simple: two-minute videos that are only viewable while the user is brushing their teeth.

This can be implemented by having a special phone holder that attaches to a toothbrush (Figure 1), which will allow the the phone to confirm (using the accelerometer and camera) that the user is in fact brushing their teeth. The phone will then authorize the user to view these uniquely-compelling two-minute videos.

***Fig. 1:*** The phone is attached to the toothbrush by an articulated arm. The phone should be positioned at optimal viewing distance. The arm should also, ideally, move around to compensate for the tooth-brushing motion (perhaps using camera-stabilization technology: *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_stabilizer*).

It might be initially difficult to incentivize video creators to produce material for such a niche use case, but that shouldn’t be a problem for long if this system catches on.

Conclusion:

A similar technique might work for hand washing; perhaps some short videos that could only be watched when a person was diligently scrubbing their hands for the recommended-but-never-followed “at least 20” seconds.

PROS: Could reduce incidence of tooth decay!

CONS: Might lead to dental disaster if people wear down their teeth to nubs by over-brushing their teeth while watching these compelling videos.