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Brushing your teeth is one of the few experiences that hasn’t varied much over the decades, with the last radical innovation being the invention of the electric toothbrush in the 1950s. So I was thrilled when the Bluetooth-enabled Beam Brush (US $50) arrived, ready for review and promising a breath of fresh air in this most mundane of activities.

The Beam Brush would, I imagined, usher me into a new era of connected oral care and geeky grooming. It senses the mouth’s bioelectricity to record each “brushing event,” then sends the data to an app (iOS or Android) on a paired smartphone so I could track my stats over time. Toothbrushing may sound like an absurd thing to monitor in detail, but not to the growing market of “quantified selfers” who already wear devices that count the number of steps they take, the calories they burn, and the hours they sleep soundly [see “How I Quantified Myself,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2012]. [Read More]