Dyson CameraJet Is an AI-Powered Camera Toothbrush
Dyson CameraJet is an AI-powered camera toothbrush that finds gaps between teeth and fires a precision jet to floss while brushing.
Photo source:
Camerajet
Dyson CameraJet Is an AI-Powered Camera Toothbrush
According
to Dyson, 9 in 10 people don't floss as regularly as they should, and the
average person brushes for just 45 seconds, well short of the two minutes
dentists recommend. The World Health Organization estimates nearly 3.7 billion
people are living with some form of oral disease globally, and Dyson points to
the gaps between teeth, the exact spots most people miss, as where plaque first
forms and eventually hardens.
Dyson
CameraJet is an AI-powered camera toothbrush built around Gap Optical
Targeting, Dyson's term for a machine learning system that spots the spaces
between teeth in real time and fires a precision jet of mouthrinse exactly
there. James Dyson, the company's founder and chief engineer, has described the
project as the result of Dyson engineers spending well over a decade studying
oral care routines and where plaque actually builds up.
How the Camera Finds What Brushing Misses
At
the center of the toothbrush sits a 100,000-pixel macro lens camera, scanning
28 images every second to identify, track, and predict gaps between teeth as
the brush moves across them. According to Dyson, once the camera spots a gap,
the toothbrush reacts within 100 milliseconds, triggering a precision jet of
mouthrinse at that exact spot. The system runs on 16 million lines of code,
with its underlying machine learning model trained on 470,000 dental images
collected during development.
Dyson
states its fluid dynamics team spent years refining the shape of the water jet,
testing against a proxy plaque material the company developed over a five-year
research partnership with the National University of Singapore's Faculty of
Dentistry, allowing engineers to test design changes without needing a full
clinical trial every time. According to Dyson's own testing, a traditional
needle-shaped jet, the kind commonly used in water flossers, punctures a hole
through plaque but doesn't fully clear it, while the company's wider, conical
jet design sweeps plaque away at a lower pressure, intended to be gentler on
gums and enamel in the process.
A Tank Built to Work Upside Down
Conventional
flossing devices typically use a straw-in-a-cup design that can draw in air and
lose pressure once tilted, which matters for a toothbrush that spends much of
its time working at an angle, especially when reaching the back teeth. Dyson's
response is what it calls an anti-gravity tank, using a diaphragm pump and a
pressure chamber designed to keep delivering consistent jets whether the brush
is upright, angled, or fully horizontal. The 12.5-milliliter tank is sized to
dispense enough rinse for a full session without oversaturating the mouth, and
a companion charging dock refills it at the press of a button in three seconds
while also charging the toothbrush between uses.
The
brush head itself carries its own engineering: a dual-bristle design with
firmer inner bristles aimed at surface stains and softer outer bristles for the
gumline, mounted on a head Dyson built with a sonic dampener to reduce noise
and vibration during use. Each head carries an RFID tag that tracks how many
cleaning cycles it's completed and alerts a user when it's due for replacement.
To address the brushing motion itself, Dyson engineers reviewed slow-motion
footage of competing sonic toothbrushes and found their bristles could stall
against tooth surfaces in hard-to-reach spots; Dyson's response, a variable
sonic oscillation that continuously varies the angle of movement, is designed
specifically to keep bristles from stalling in the same way.
An App and a Full System Built Around the Brush
CameraJet
connects over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and its onboard camera doubles as an
endoscope a user can view live through the MyDyson app, letting someone see
roughly what a dentist would see during a checkup. Dyson states the camera
activates only during live viewing or while actively jetting, and that no
images are recorded or stored on the device or in the cloud. Through the same
app, users get guided cleaning routines, coverage mapping showing which areas
were actually cleaned, and personalized feedback intended to improve technique
over time, along with a choice between automatic and manual jetting modes.
Dyson
didn't stop at the toothbrush itself. The launch includes a proprietary
toothpaste formulated without the common foaming agent SLS, specifically so
foam doesn't obscure the camera's view, alongside a low-foaming mouthrinse
designed to work with the precision jet. Both products contain sodium fluoride
for enamel strength, alongside phosphates and xylitol. Dyson states are aimed at
the bacterial source of plaque and tartar, and both come in Ginger Mint and
Spearmint flavors, with a separate sensitive-teeth toothpaste variant also
available.
What a Six-Year, 38-Patent Project Still Has to Prove
Dyson
states that 661 of its engineers worked on the device over six years of development,
resulting in 38 filed patents. The comparison to needle-type jets and the
"69% more plaque" figure against competing premium toothbrushes both
come from Dyson's own laboratory testing, using its own proxy plaque and its
own defined comparison group, not an independent, peer-reviewed clinical study.
One
claim does rest on an actual clinical test, though a modest one: Dyson cites a
four-week study with 71 participants comparing its own formulations against a
manual toothbrush paired with Dyson toothpaste, rather than against a broad
field of existing electric toothbrushes and independent flossing methods.
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