Your toothbrush certainly does not need an app. But what's the game, I wonder, for the dental insurance company? I mean, _why_ do they want your data? Aggregate data on habits? The chance to shape behavior (better habits) of customers through nags, gamification, etc? Eventually rates tied to compliance? Advertising opps?
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I would imagine the insurance company wants all of things you speculated on. Insurances companies would love to know which statistical bucket you fall into, so they can charge you more or less based on your risk of making a claim.
"According to our records your purchases of junk food have increased 16.2% since the previous calendar year. Your insurance premiums have been adjusted accordingly."
This is some Black Mirror level garbage. If this becomes common place there'll be an explosion of automation devices to "use" your toothbrush a couple of times per day.
We should be so lucky that our data would be used to encourage healthy living as opposed to to status quo.
Except when this would drive negative feedback loops. The following scenario may not be frequent or probable, but it is definitely plausible:
1. A rural area has few healthy eating options.
2. Everyone who cares about this sort of thing and has the means to move away leaves.
3. Healthy stores close because there are not enough customers.
4. Only junk food options remain. Now you've essentially increased societal segregation...
This may sound ridiculous, but it is already seriously hard to eat healthy in many areas of the country.
That's actually a positive feedback loop.
You are right! I meant positive feedback driving a negative phenomenon.
It's not. If you want to eat healthy, go to McDonalds and get a burger. Go to Walmart.
You're serious? What's healthy about that?
A burger is made of meat...
What do you think you need to eat healthy? Some meat, some fat, maybe a few carbs.
This seems similar to those telemetrics devices that some car insurers offer. My guess is that they could charge more or less depending on how often you brush your teeth.
Microphones, clock hardware, light sensors, geolocation devices, Bluetooth hardware, WI-fi hardware, and accelerometers are all small enough to fit in an electric toothbrush handle alongside a battery and a toothbrush motor.
One could write software which runs on the toothbrush and reports back everything it can sense in the area. This grants the upstream provider up-to-date information on the environment where the toothbrush is. It's not hard to see how this is profitable in an age where spying is big business. This need not have anything to do with dentistry. Businesses are typically more interested in making more money than they are in adhering to someone else's vision of consistency.
How this data is used is, as always, up to those who possess a copy of the data, and utterly indefinable now. For all we know, it might be handy to know that a Bluetooth device with ID XYZ was present near a given set of global coordinates at a certain time of day and date. Asking how the data is useful is hard to say specifically like asking why a library (public or private) would have a copy of a particular work -- that copy might be useful to someone someday and it is easier than ever to get the public to cooperate in their own loss of privacy by framing every issue around convenience.