Toothbrush Teardown & Redesign
Group of 3: 3/19/2022
Overview
The goal of this project was to teardown an OralB Electric Toothbrush to understand it's design, and then redesign the toothbrush so that it would be suitable for a client suffering from Cerebral Palsy.
Research
We needed to do more research into Cerebral Palsy before we could design a product that met our user's needs.
Ataxic Cerebral Palsy
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Effects coordination, depth perception
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Posture is difficult so is coordinating voluntary movements
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Interferes most with muscle control in legs/arms
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Tremors can be common/shakey or jerky movement
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Often from correction of inaccurate movement
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Reaching for something → may overshoot target
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Difficulty with precise finger movements
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Hard to do repetitive movements
Cerebral Palsy and Oral Hygiene
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Some children with cerebral palsy have gastrointestinal reflux and tend to reflux or vomit on a frequent basis
Design
Risks/Safety Concerns
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Possible difficulty gripping/aiming
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Vibration can make it difficult to hold
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Heavier than typical toothbrush
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Placement of charger
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Squeezing and aiming toothpaste
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Rinsing and spitting spit/water in mouth
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Chipping tooth
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Choking hazard
Key Metrics/Qualities to Implement
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Water hose for rinsing mouth
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If we want can implement something for her to spit in but she could also just use a cup
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Retainer-like design that covers all teeth and does not require fine-motor skills
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Rechargeable layout
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Add another attachment that will clean tongue and/or roof of mouth
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Design must be water-resistant
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Make hand grip easy to grasp
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Apply ridges to increase friction
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Allows for one-hand operation
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Buttons that are easy to press
Anthropometric Measurements
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Measurements of 62.0 mm wide, 50.8 mm deep, and 26.2 mm high
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Unable to find tongue width, so based on the width between the teeth, at its widest point the tongue is ~59 mm
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Based off of this, we will make our tongue cleaner attachment about 55 mm wide
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We want our product to be able to fit the majority of the population, so we will take hand measurements from the 99th percentile
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Hand length: 20.50 cm ∓ .97 cm
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Hand breadth: 8.86 cm ∓ .38 cm
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Using these values, we will design the handle of the brush to be longer than 8.86 cm so that there is enough grip space
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Will make the handle 90 mm (9 cm) wide assuming that fingers make up about half of the hand so that there is enough grip space
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Could not find anthropometric data for fingers so we measured our own fingers
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Note: the data is outdated (1989)
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Results
To the left is a sketch I created of our final project design, which we called The Accessibrush!
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