We Created a Digital Dental Check-Up for Those Who Can't Access a Dentist

We both graduated from City University in July 2015 and that summer we started our mission to get this technology into the hands of people and take the skills we learnt during our Biomedical Engineering degree and use it to create a positive impact.

Worldwide, over 60% of children and nearly 100% of adults have tooth decay (Source: WHO). A lot of this is preventable; regular monitoring would pick up plaque and inflamed gums before they develop into tooth decay and gum disease. However, a great deal of people do not have access to a dentist - because of cost, or even fear - and even those that do visit the dentist only see them twice a year, which means that they are left alone for the other 363 days to manage the health of their teeth and gums.

There is currently no means when away from a dentist to know how well we are cleaning our teeth and gums. We do not have a tool to tell us where to specifically focus or to indicate whether we're improving the health of our teeth and gums or not.

One of the founders, Hawaa created the PlaqueChecker technology for her final year project at university and her inspiration came from her sister who was refused braces due to the high levels of plaque on her teeth and was told to come back when she had it under control. This could have been prevented if she had a way of regularly monitoring her teeth.

Hawaa's sister is not the only person who lacks the ability to to regularly monitor their teeth when away from the dentist as there is currently no digital means of checking the health of your teeth and gums from home.

We both graduated from City University in July 2015 and that summer we started our mission to get this technology into the hands of people and take the skills we learnt during our Biomedical Engineering degree and use it to create a positive impact.

PlaqueChecker is an app that works on an affordable subscription model to allow anyone with a smartphone to get a digital dental check-up- it works by clipping on a mouthpiece onto their phone and taking 3 easy pictures. The user will immediately be shown where their inflamed gum and plaque areas are located as well be provided with personalised care in order to help the user improved.

Our mission is to improve the oral health of individuals globally using digital technology. We want to provide personalised dental care that is accessible for anyone who has a smartphone. The dental sector has been standstill for far too long and we aim to positively disrupt this ancient system by providing the world's first immediate digital check-up in the hope that the unbelievable statistics associated with poor oral health drop.

We work alongside image processing experts and dentists to ensure that the technology indicates areas of plaque and areas of inflamed gums areas in line with a dental professional. We are currently working on advancing the technology further to release our beta-app. If anyone reading this would like to be one of our first users to test out the app or if you would just like to have a chat, please contact us on info@plaquechecker.

We aim to re-create the way everyone takes care of their teeth and we would love you to join the PlaqueChecker team, so please subscribe to follow our journey on www.plaquechecker.com and follow us on Twitter- @PlaqueChecker.

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