Have you ever wondered what your teeth looked like while you’re brushing them? Well wonder no more. Dental care start-up Onvi has created a toothbrush that lets you scope out your teeth as you brush them by watching a live video on your phone.
“[The Prophix] is going to empower people to take better care of their health,” said Onvi founder Dr. Craig S. Kohler. “It’s a system that’s designed to work with their dental health professional to … do a more thorough job because they can see what’s going on in their mouth.”
The Prophix is not the first smart toothbrush. In fact, there’s a whole wave of them either on the market or coming soon. They are all based on a similar proposition; by connecting your toothbrush to a smartphone app — iOS only for now, but the Android app is on the way — your toothbrush will be able to get more data on how you brush, which can help users and their dentists take better care of their teeth. Where many of the connected brushes, including a Bluetooth-enabled model by Oral-B, simply projects user brushing data on a chart, the Prophix lets you modify and spot clean your teeth based on what’s actually there.
The difference is a matter of immediacy: Tracking data on brushing your teeth is only useful if you study it. With Prophix’ feed, you can attend to the spots you might have missed the moment you notice them. While you can’t record and save the entire video through the app, it is possible to snap a picture of any trouble spots to share with your dentist.
In addition to the standard electric toothbrush, the Prophix comes with interchangeable heads that offer other dental tools, such as a mirror, a prophy cup that cleans under the gum line, and a rubber gum stimulator tip. There’s an expanded bundle that also adds a “scaler” for removing plaque from your lower front teeth. If the prospect of using all those tools seems daunting, that’s OK: The Prophix tracks your brushing and offers tips on how to brush more effectively.
The Prophix toothbrush is expected to ship to pre-order customers in the first quarter of 2017.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.