Brushee
Brushee
A “tooth-brushing companion” to help encourage kids to brush their teeth.
“Brushee,” a Tangible User Interfaces project featuring Neera Grover, Mudit Kakkar, and myself, takes up the design challenge of making an educational device specifically for pre-linguistic children. While the three of us together selected the demographic, conducted research, interviewed parents of infants and toddlers, and picked a technological approach, Neera pioneered the firmware, software, and Processing challenges to achieve visualization, while I hacked away at the hardware. Hardware included:
A wireless toothbrush, wherein I replaced the vibration motor in a normal kids toothbrush with a microprocessor, accelerometer, and NRF24L01 Transceiver
A toothbrush holder, including buttons for character selection
A “magic mirror”—a surface that seems to serve as a mirror, but which also contains a display, controlled by an Arduino plus NRF24L01 Receiver
Access the full paper, and also a gallery, below.
