I tried the $299 Feno Smartbrush to clean my teeth. This is Mouthful
I couldn’t help but giggle. A dreamy giggle. I was brushing my teeth, but it wasn’t an ordinary toothbrush I was using.
That was it Feno Smartbrush — and with its 18,000 bristles it navigated all my teeth, top and bottom, simultaneously. The vibration was surprisingly different.
My entire lower face was shaking, from my gum line to the base of my jaw. It felt like a massage for my teeth, cheeks and craniofacial muscles around my mouth. A frothy residue ran down my chin and chest.
The Feno Smartbrush is a mouthful.
It was a mouthful. In a good way.
For an anxious, teeth-grinding adult like me, the silly mirror image of my mouth vibrating for 20 seconds was worth the feeling that came with it. Plus, it removed all those tough goji berry residues that always seem to elude my regular electric toothbrush.
The Smartbrush is a U-shaped device with a top and bottom like the mouth guards used by athletes, attached to a fist-sized handle that holds the power source and camera. It is the flagship product of Feno, a 3-year-old company driven by the belief that “transformative oral health technology” is on the cusp of a breakthrough moment.
It was created by Dr. Kenny Brown, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon who is also Feno’s CEO and co-founder. He designed it to address problems he saw firsthand with his patients.
“We believe that oral health is your overall health,” Brown tells me when we meet at BioscienceLAwhich for Feno doubles as a non-profit organization for health technology companies and its individuals. “When it comes to oral hygiene, patients tend to fail in two areas: time and technique.”
How many of us really spend more than the 2 minutes dentists recommend brushing our teeth? And are we really brushing our teeth as effectively as we should? Feno cuts the time down to just 20 seconds, and its Smartbrush does the work for you.
It’s a radically different approach to the normal at-home oral care options available, and retails for a breathtaking $299 for a three-month starter kit. There are other high-end, high-tech devices, including the U-shaped Curaprox Samba robotic toothbrush and on Philips Sonicare Prestige 9900which packs some AI into a more standard-looking electric toothbrush.
But none of these devices have the Feno’s customization features, like six variations on its U-shaped mouthpiece top and bottom. Feno also excels at tracking and analyzing your brushing habits and your mouth in general, with reports via a $10 monthly Feno Plus membership designed to support long-term preventative care.
Brown’s training and experience is another distinguishing factor.
Watch this: These AI robots want to do your chores for you
What you get with the Feno Smartbrush
I did my experiment with $299 Founder’s Edition Packagewhich contains a Smartbrush (consisting of a Feno Smarthandle and SnapCharger), a TrueFit mouthpiece, three tubes of mint-flavored XyFoam toothpaste, a tongue scraper and three months of Feno Plus to access personalized health insights and virtual oral health coaching.
First I sent selfies of my mouth through Feno’s FitKitapp, allowing the Feno team to map it, size it and pair it with one of six mouthpieces, and waited for my images to be analyzed and approved. The kit arrived in the mail a week later in a large, well-designed box.
After unpacking, I downloaded the Feno app and connected it to the newly loaded Smartbrush. (The Apple MagSafe-like charger attaches to the back of the Feno’s Smarthandle, looking more like a stethoscope.)
This is where I was able to customize my Feno experience. I can change the speed and time of brushing while the artificial intelligence follows the rhythm of brushing. The vibration of the brush allowed me to maneuver it around the sides of my mouth, providing a nice jaw massage in the process.
You use the Smarthandle to take a scan of your mouth.
For the next two weeks, I used the Smartbrush twice a day for 20 seconds each. Once connected to Feno’s Wi-Fi network (this won’t affect your home internet connection), I can also connect my Smartbrush to Feno’s app, which monitors my brushing and scanning.
After brushing, I positioned the Smartbrush 10 inches from my face and pressed a button to capture and send data about my oral health to the Feno team for feedback. With regular use, reports are returned every two weeks with information on the condition of your teeth, gums, tongue and soft tissues, plus a digital health score, a summary analysis of your mouth and feedback to improve or correct your mouth scan. With consistency, the built-in scanner will learn your mouth and note any changes that occur.
“(Over time) you will have the largest set of longitudinal data in the mouth, actionable data made as easy as possible so it can be done as easily as once a day,” Brown said. “Then you can understand what’s going on in your mouth.”
Feno will send you regular reports on the status of your oral health.
The evolution of Feno
After my trial run with the Smartbrush, I visited the Feno facilities where the product is tested, packaged and shipped to talk with Braun about the device, its integration with artificial intelligence, and the state of oral health care.
Feno’s prototype space, fulfillment center and company office are located in the long, one-story brick exterior of the health technology center; blue and green letters read “BioscienceLA” across its windows.
Inside, shiny white plaster walls and squeaky clean floors make up the building’s sleek, modern interior.
Dr. Kenny Brown is the creator of the Feno Smartbrush.
This is where the members of the equally passionate core team – eight people, including three dentists – can be found. (Brown can also be found on the phone with customers for post-purchase feedback.)
Our conversation took place in Feno’s prototype office, the largest of the three spaces I toured. Nearby, 3D prototyping printers emit a soothing hum and an ambient orange glow. The physical evolutions of Feno’s TrueFit mouthpiece lie to my right.
As an oral surgeon and entrepreneur, Brown is an anomaly, a black oral surgeon in an industry where just under 4% of dentists, dental hygienists, and oral surgeons are black. With his creation of the AI-powered Smartbrush, he is also a pioneer. He exudes passion for oral care – and humanity.
(We’ll take a moment here to acknowledge another pioneer, Dr. Bobby Petersonthe famous Shark Tank orthodontist who invented the Big Mouth electric toothbrush.)
Brown estimates that nearly 50 percent of American adults have some form of gum disease and chronic inflammation. Feno, he says, can address this challenge with “full-mouth” U-shaped products.
“The idea is better, faster, easier — but it also levels the playing field,” Brown said. “Doing that on the technology front shows, ‘Look, these solutions are for everybody.’ At the end of the day, it’s about serving others.”
The TrueFit mouthpiece design
The TrueFit mouthpiece began with over 20,000 digital patient impressions to inform a mouth-sizing algorithm that evolved into over 100,000 designs with different bristle shapes, widths, heights and configurations.
“It can be extremely risky and expensive to make thousands of prototypes. We used a combination of clinical knowledge, digital impressions, generative AI technology and 3D printing to help us create (ours),” Brown said. “Efficiency is the number one thing. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter.”
The Feno mouthpiece design went through many iterations.
Brown and his team used generative AI — custom algorithms written with Rhino 3D and Grasshopper design software — to test and optimize for the most effective mouthpiece, including features such as “bristle contact with tooth surfaces and gum line.” These iterations turned into several hundred 3D-printed prototypes, tested again on patients to ensure clinical standards.
Today, Feno has six variations of the TrueFit mouthpiece that differ in dental arch, jawline and oral cavity dimensions, depending on customer needs. Whether it’s arch width or depth, a crooked tooth or gum recession, the goal is for all 18,000 bristles on your Feno TrueFit mouthpiece to touch all of your teeth – 250 strokes per tooth – so you can brush your teeth within 20 seconds. Smarthandle will pause and alert you to ease brushing pressure if needed.
The TrueFit mouthpiece connects to Feno’s Smarthandle, which uses camera vision, an artificial intelligence that can analyze visual data. Every time you scan your mouth with the Smarthandle’s built-in scanner, it tracks signs of poor oral health or abnormalities that require attention and compiles them into a data report.
Although these insights are not considered diagnostic, Feno has the information quality checked by a dentist for precision and accuracy.
“We really try to be intentional about what we give to customers,” Brown said. “Seeing people and meeting them where they are is the best form of caring, something you can’t capture with any kind technical It’s humanity.”
My experience with the Feno Smartbrush
For me, in this two-week trial run, Smartbrush worked.
My gums were sore at first (Feno notes that this can happen), but my teeth felt…cleaned, like all 18,000 bristles vibrating in different directions had removed all the plaque in my mouth.
As new to the market as the Feno is, much remains to be seen about how well the Smartbrush performs and what oral analyzes reveal over time. At $299 up front plus $10 per month, this system is asking you to make a significant investment. Still, I’m intrigued by this innovative approach.
After my experience I decided to keep my Smartbrush. In the past three years, I’ve been told by two different dentists that I’ll need veneers before I’m 40. (A worrying claim for a 29-year-old who’s had braces twice.) Every six months I leave an appointment increasingly worried about it , which happens in my mouth—or, according to Brown, my body—without a solution or a long-term plan. Maybe this is the start of one.
As always, as a savvy consumer, you should do your research, talk to your dentist, and gauge your comfort level when spending on an expensive, cutting-edge device.
Along with brushing your teeth, twice a day.
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