Brush your teeth with HealthKit
With the Health app on your iPhone you can record all kinds of body values, such as your weight and your blood pressure. You can do this automatically if you have a connected scale or a smart blood pressure monitor. But nowadays brushing your teeth can also be ‘connected’. You can find all your brushing sessions in the Health app, so you can be sure whether you have brushed for 2 minutes.
- Brush your teeth with HealthKit
- Add manually
- Add automatically with apps
- Add automatically
Smart toothbrushes with an app can be found at Coolblue, Bol.com and in our overview of smart toothbrushes.
Does your dentist regularly complain that you should brush longer? Then from now on you can prove with HealthKit that you are really doing your best. The Health app contains the ‘Brushing teeth’ section. You can manually record your cleaning sessions there, but it is of course very convenient if it is automatic. For this you need a smart toothbrush that can exchange data with HealthKit, for example the connected toothbrushes from Oral-B and Philips.
Enter manual tooth brushing
To manually enter your toothbrushing activities, go to the Health app:
- Open the Health app and open the Data tab.
- Search for ‘Brushing teeth’.
- Tap Add details.
- Complete the cleaning manually.
- Tap Add.
A disadvantage of filling in manually is that you have to round to the nearest whole minute, while you sometimes spend 2:10 minutes cleaning. You want to take those ten extra seconds to increase your average. Moreover, it is a lot more work. Automatically registers brushing teeth
Auto-entry with timer apps
If you don’t have a smart toothbrush, you can also use a timer app. For example, there is the Clean Teeth app to time brushing your teeth. This Dutch app by Tom Lokhorst shows each quadrant that you need to brush, in random order. This was done because you probably brush better at the beginning than at the end. At the end of your brushing, the exact number of seconds is saved in HealthKit. Useful!
Enter automatic tooth brushing in HealthKit
Of the products we discussed in our overview of smart toothbrushes, Oral-B and Philips are at least suitable. Oral-B followed in March 2020 with an update of the app of the same name. Philips made the Sonicare toothbrushes suitable in December 2021. The toothbrush itself cannot transmit the data directly to HealthKit via Bluetooth. The manufacturer’s app is required for this.
After giving permission to share your data with Healthkit, you will see your brushing sessions appear in the app via the steps mentioned above: in the Health app, go to the Data tab and search for ‘brushing teeth’ (or one of the two words).
All brushings appear in the Health app and you can also see what your average is. With an asterisk you can add ‘Brushing teeth’ to your favorites, so that from now on you can immediately see how your brushing sessions are going when you start the app.
View our overview of smart toothbrushes with an overview of all options and prices of the most popular models.
