Elevated dentist diagnostic tools, easy access to dynamic care plan, smart toothbrush and custom head subscription, and personalized formulations
Beyond the brush: Building the future of oral health
Why oral care needs a makeover
Oral health is foundational to overall health, yet it’s often sidelined in both public health policy and everyday routines. For many, dental care is a daily annoyance or a reactive crisis centered around acute pain and emergency services. But what if it could be something more? What if oral health were proactive, personalized, and embedded into the unique rhythms of each persons everyday life?
To unlock this potential, three ecosystem pathways can guide the way: expert-driven personalization, elevated rituals, and all-day oral care. Each offer unique ways to embed oral health more deeply into people’s lives.
From siloed to synced: Making oral care work smarter
An ecosystem is a connected network of products, services, people, and digital tools that work together to support someone across time and touchpoints. Ecosystems have the potential to create continuous engagement, seamless experiences, and personalized feedback. Unlike isolated interventions such as a single app, toothbrush, or check-up, an oral health ecosystem can drive more consistent and effective habits.
Take our work with Gatorade on their Gx ecosystem, for example. It successfully connects smart bottles, athlete sweat testing, personalized hydration pods, and a coaching app into one cohesive platform. By linking physical products with real-time insights and behavior nudges, Gx shows how syncing tools and touchpoints can transform fragmented routines into a performance-driven system that helps athletes train smarter and recover faster.
Oral care is ripe for a similar ecosystem approach considering the current experience is so fragmented. People learn about hygiene in one place, use disconnected products, rely on outdated habits, and often only seek professional care when problems arise. This lack of integration leaves both users and professionals struggling to stay aligned, limiting the potential of oral care to deliver broader, long-term health benefits. However, promising technologies from connected toothbrushes, AI diagnostics, and virtual coaching, are entering the market but remain siloed and underutilized.
Designing the future of oral care
By creating a continuous care loop through smart data, connected devices, and personalized nudges, ecosystem interventions lay the groundwork for both more advanced and meaningful oral care experiences.
Expert driven personalization:
The future of oral care has opportunities for personalized partnerships between patients and professionals. Ecosystems can integrate dynamic diagnostics, smart devices, and professional insight to deliver tailored care plans. Elevated diagnostic tools, like AI-powered imaging and saliva testing, can give providers better visibility into patients’ oral health. These insights can then feed directly into custom care plans.
Elevated rituals:
Oral care has long been seen as a chore—functional, clinical, even dull. But ecosystems offer an opportunity to reposition it as a form of personal wellness. By tapping into broader trends in self-care, microbiome awareness, and sensorial experiences, we can elevate oral hygiene into something people look forward to. This reframe not only enhances the experience, but builds emotional connection and long-term engagement too.
Holistic tooth “spa” experiences, oral health at-home testing, Day/Night sensory infused toothpaste, and personalized oral wellness kits
All-day oral care:
Oral health shouldn’t be confined to morning and night routines. Ecosystems can extend care throughout the day by embedding oral health into other touchpoints and behaviors. Cross-category partnerships can bring oral care into new contexts, helping people build resilient habits that prevent common issues like cavities and gum disease.
Partnerships with health apps, portable oral health tracking, occasion driven products, and expanding care out of category
Designing a system that makes you smile
The future of oral health isn’t a better toothbrush. It’s a better system. One that integrates behavior, technology, and care into something seamless; something people want to be part of. Ecosystems offer the blueprint. With insights from real people, partnerships with public health leaders, and input from care providers, designers and technologists have an opportunity to build it.
Together, we can shape the future of oral health to meet people where they are, across their routines, needs, and aspirations. Whether you’re a healthcare brand, tech innovator, or wellness leader, there’s an opportunity to move from isolated products to an integrated ecosystem to help drive revenue growth.