Colgate’s high-tech electric toothbrush knows where you are brushing

Electric toothbrushes have certainly come a long way and having used the best in class Oral-B then seen the ideas like the connected smart toothbrush at CES we’ve certainly got a lot to look forward to in this space.  Colgate has joined forces with sensing and control technology company OMRON to bring something very different to market – automatic sense and adjust.

With most electric toothbrushes you’ve got different brush heads and different speeds to choose from which will customise the brushing experience.  I’ve not seen before a brush that actually changes its settings automatically as you brush.

Here’s how it works. Once you turn the brush on – in Auto mode you start brushing away and as you move around your teeth the brush senses the angle at which it is being held and adjusts the speed of the brush head to suit.

I found that it gives a slow gentle speed on the side and gums, while on an angle to the edges and inside of the teeth you go up a gear.  Run the brush flat along the tops of your teeth or dip it down in behind your front teeth and you’re in top gear.

It’s a very strange sensation, and the sonic-wave cleaning action does take at least 4-5 days to get used to. Frankly – for me, it tickled quite a bit when I first used it and that was a strange sensation even for someone who is used to using an electric brush each and every day.

You have a two-minute timer built-in, after which the brush just stops, and after each 30 second interval there is a quick pause so you can track your timing moving from each quarter of your teeth to the next.

Now here’s where I future gaze and wonder how far off it is before Colgate connects this information back to your smartphone via bluetooth so you can see where and how you could brush better.  Something to think about.

There is no doubt this is providing a fantastic cleaning experience, however I can’t help feel like I’m not getting a solid clean on the outside of the teeth when the brush it at it’s slowest, so I’ve found myself manually controlling the speed at times.

Another area for improvement might be to make that pause every 30 seconds slightly longer, and to not shut-off but to pause even longer at the end of two minutes.

Picky, but if you’re forking out $199.95 you want the best features possible.

There are two other brushes below the top-of-the-line A1500 as tested, the C600 is $149.95 and C200 is $99.95 – both don’t have the automatic function which is the main step down.

[schema type=”review” rev_name=”Colgate A1500 ProClinical electric toothbrush” rev_body=”Great brush with amazing auto-sensing technology which is hard to adjust to but offers a great clean” author=”Trevor Long” pubdate=”2014-02-06″ user_review=”3.5″ min_review=”0″ max_review=”5″ ]