Interview: Alex Frommeyer, Beam Technologies CEO – Using Sensors to Add Consistency to Brushing

Beam Technologies has created a tech enabled toothbrush to engage people with their oral health and wellness routine. The Beam Brush and app sync together to capture the length and start time of each brush.Alex Frommeyer, Beam CEO, describes the product as “taking the most fundamental data on brushing and oral care compliance and using that data to help users with their consistency, connect users to their dentist / hygienist and to also engage users with an incentives model.” The app rewards good, consistent, daily brushing with incentives including movie tickets and shopping deals.Later in the year, Alex and his team will begin to talk more publicly about using the toothbrush as a platform. He makes an excellent point in saying “Brushing your teeth regularly makes the toothbrush a daily touch point. If you brush twice a day for 2 minutes each, roughly every 12 hours you have 2 minutes of unforced interaction with a product. The next thing for us to do (by early 2014) is to introduce additional sensors into the toothbrush to observe other physical metrics.”Focused mostly on the hardware piece last year, for 2013 Beam will also work on building out a more intensive version of the Beam Brush mobile app, enabling push notifications and reminders for oral health, including flossing.So what inspired this idea? Fascinated by building devices, Alex and his team wanted to develop something that would create real value while making sensors more mainstream. As Alex puts it, “The most important piece about Beam is that we want to make everyday activities part of improving your health. We don’t want to ask our customers to do brand new things to improve their health – we want to improve their current routines.”You can purchase the Beam Brush online through the website and on Amazon.com.