Toothbrush design: Adapting for the future

Abstract

The Mentadent Adaptor is a novel toothbrush developed to gently deliver excellent oral health benefits combining optimal plaque control with oral hard and soft tissue care. It has outer tufts individually mounted in an elastomer to allow flexibility under toothbrushing pressures, enabling adaptation to the surface contours of the oral cavity. These unique properties could not be measured using conventional methods and therefore, oral metrology, a new technique that enables microscopic changes in both soft and hard tissue to be quantified, was used to determine the effect of the toothbrush, in combination with toothpastes of different abrasivity, on soft and hard tissues. A further study compared the performance of the Mentadent Adaptor at maintaining gingival health with that of an internationally recognised toothbrush. It was concluded that the Mentadent Adaptor toothbrush is effective at maintaining oral health, and offers a measurable advantage over an internationally recognised toothbrush at reducing gingival bleeding and plaque accumulation. Furthermore it is potentially kinder to the hard and soft oral tissues.