Written on April 12, 2008 – 3:00 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Many children don’t really know how to brush their teeth and maintain a decent oral hygiene. In fact there are lots of adults that don’t care at all about their oral hygiene when they get buried under tons of papers at the office – they got some chewing gum handy. But that isn’t enough.

Some Taiwanese experts have come up with an ingenious way to encourage young children to keep their teeth in good shape: they turned a toothbrush into some sort of a stripped-down Nintendo Wii remote and thus, transformed a chore into a funny interactive video game.

Responsible for this project is Hao-hua Chu and his team at the National Taiwan University and it looks like their "learning through play" approach proves to be the way to go. In this sense, they managed to attach a simple box-shaped extension with a unique pattern of three LEDs on each face to the end of a tooth brush. The LEDs can be easily tracked using advanced webcams and computerized detection. For this part of the process you need to install a webcam on the wall above the bathroom sink. This way, the webcam will detect the movements of the tooth brush in a 3D manner and feed this information into a computer. The computer then distinguishes the x-axis "roll" and z-axis "yaw".

Here’s a short film that explains the whole process: