‘Smart’ toothbrushes coming soon to bathroom near you

Last year it was a fork that claimed to help you change your eating habits that grabbed attention at the International CES exhibition in Las Vegas; this year, it could be the turn of a connected toothbrush.

With devices becoming increasingly smarter and connected, it was only a matter of time before someone revamped the humble electric toothbrush. The smart toothbrush is the brainchild of Kolibree, and comes with a free mobile app that will synchronise with the toothbrush via Bluetooth and tell if you brushed long enough and well enough, and if you missed out some of those hard to reach parts of your mouth.

You can then share the information with family members – useful for parents – or with your dentists.

The company, which has offices in New York, Silicon Valley and Paris, claim the product is a world first. It taps into the current trend for using connected devices to help improve health and wellness that has exploded in recent times.

At a preview of CES for the press, companies showed off devices from a UV bracelet that measures your sun exposure and lets you know when it’s time to reapply your sun cream to a new system that is intended to help you improve your sleep.

Withings showed off its latest technology, the Withings Aura, a system that is designed to monitor and improve your sleep. Using a bedside device and a sleep sensor that fits under your mattress, the product measures everything from sleep cycle and heart rates to the room environment, and then creates light and sound programmes to help you sleep better in future.

The connected home also features at the exhibition, with Belkin unveiling a new smart slow cooker that integrates its Wemo technology, so you can control it from outside the house.

Ahead of the official start of CES, Nvidia revealed its new Tegra K1 product, a chip aimed at the mobile and tablet sector that comes with 192 cores. Based on Nvidia's Kepler GPU architecture for PCs, the chip is expected to up the game for mobile devices, making them capable of running more advanced video games.

CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said the benefits to games developers would be “immense”.

“This is real-time computer graphics on a little mobile chip,” he said.

CES officially opens on January 7th and runs until January 10th.