Are Patients Ready for Wearable Oral Health Tech?

By Paige Anderson, CRDH

Smart watches can provide constant data collection on everything from your sleep quality to how many steps you take in a day. Soon, wearable mouth tech may provide this same type of ongoing insight into your patients’ oral health or even other aspects of their systemic wellbeing.

What Is Wearable Mouth Tech?

Saliva provides an incredible amount of information about our health. It even has the potential to replace blood for many types of tests. Wearable mouth tech involves intraoral biosensors that monitor saliva chemistry and provide useful analytics.

There are several device formats currently in development:

• Mouthguard sensors that track salivary glucose, uric acid, and electrolytes via wireless transmission.
• Tooth-mounted Bluetooth devices that bond directly to a tooth surface like an orthodontic bracket.
• Tissue-adhesive gum patches that detect inflammatory proteins to monitor gum disease progress.
• Intraoral pH brackets that use optical gel sensors to give early alerts about oral and systemic illness.

Where Does the Science Stand?

Wearable technology is nothing new. Even before smartwatches, continuous glucose monitors made it possible for people with diabetes to get real-time feedback on their blood sugar. Modern technology allows us to pack incredible functionality into impressively tiny microchips, creating powerful sensors small enough to be suitable and comfortable in the oral environment.

Many of these sensors are close to being ready for real-world applications. However, specific types of analytics, such as the continuous detection of low-abundance markers like cytokines, pose significant challenges and are further from usability.

Challenges for wearable mouth tech include:

• A chemically harsh environment degrades sensor surfaces over time.
• Calibration drift is difficult to control across days or weeks.
• Significant mechanical forces can physically damage or dislodge devices.
• Cost will likely be prohibitive at first, but may decrease over time.

The wearable mouth tech market currently sits at about $11 billion and is projected to reach around $20 billion by 2035, but it depends on solving problems that researchers openly acknowledge as unsolved. Supply chain disruptions could also create significant microchip shortages. Currently, these devices are in prototype or FDA-pending status, so don’t expect them to hit the market anytime soon.

The Clinical Promise

Even with these significant challenges, the potential is real, especially in three core areas for oral health:

• Periodontitis: Continuous monitoring of the gingival crevicular fluid could identify inflammatory flare-ups before tissue destruction begins. Texas A&M researchers frame the goal as “shifting oral healthcare from reactive responses to anticipatory action.”
• Caries Risk: Continuous pH monitoring could provide a new level of precision in risk assessments, supporting more effective preventive dentistry and more compelling and defensible treatment recommendations.
• Systemic Health: Salivary biomarkers for glucose regulation, cortisol, and cardiovascular inflammation could give doctors important insights. It’s not unlikely that physicians may turn to dentists to fabricate or place the devices.

Are Patients Likely to Be on Board?

Many patients already expect continuous health data from their wearables, so the idea of wearable mouth tech probably won’t be too far-fetched for them. We may expect potential push-back in a few key areas.

1. Cost. Like any new technology, these devices are likely to be most expensive shortly after they hit the market, but may decrease in cost over time.
2. Comfort. We can expect developers to prioritize making these devices as comfortable and low-profile as possible, but some patients will struggle to tolerate them regardless.
3. Value and purpose of the output. This level of data collection may not improve treatment recommendation outcomes significantly enough to justify the cost.
4. Privacy and data protection. These devices will need to send data to software for it to be usable, and patients will want to know that their information is being protected. Wearable mouth tech will likely integrate with AI software, making privacy an even bigger issue for many patients.

Will Wearable Mouth Tech Be Right for Your Practice?

Many dentists jump at the chance to improve their diagnostic capabilities and patient outcomes with new technology. Like any other diagnostic tool, wearable mouth tech will generate data that you, as a clinician, will need to interpret and use to accurately inform your care. Practitioners who understand underlying biomarkers and can translate that data into more effective treatments may be able to deliver a fundamentally different level of care. However, there is also the potential that an overabundance of data could just be unnecessary noise.

It remains to be seen whether this level of monitoring will significantly change how we practice dentistry. At the end of the day, whether wearable mouth tech is right for your patients will be a decision you’ll need to help them make, with full transparency and consideration of their comfort level.

Author: Paige Anderson is a certified registered dental hygienist with eight years of clinical experience and an English degree. She blends her two areas of expertise to create resources for dental providers, enabling them to change lives by providing their patients the highest possible standard of care.