Yes, you read that correctly: Home Assistant now integrates with Bluetooth-enabled toothbrushes from Oral-B, the renowned American brand. This new feature leverages the recently relaunched Bluetooth integration, allowing Home Assistant to automatically detect and connect to supported toothbrushes within range.
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What the Oral-B integration with Home Assistant has to offer
Once integrated, Home Assistant gains access to six sensors provided by your Oral-B toothbrush:
- Mode Sensor: Identifies the current mode of the toothbrush, such as Daily Clean, Intense Clean, Super Sensitive, or Tongue Cleaner.
- Sector Sensors: Reports the number of sectors set up in the Oral-B mobile app, the current sector being brushed, and the time spent brushing each sector.
- Time Sensor: Tracks the total brushing time in seconds.
- State Sensor: Indicates whether the toothbrush is running or idle.
This integration supports a wide range of Oral-B toothbrush models, from budget-friendly options to high-end variants:
- iO 4 Series
- iO Series 7
- iO Series 8
- iO Series 9
- Smart Series 7000
- Genius Series 9000
Why integrate an Oral-B toothbrush with Home Assistant?
At first glance, the Oral-B integration with Home Assistant might not appear to be anything more than a useless gimmick. However, there are genuine applications within automations and triggers. The first one I could imagine myself using might not be relevant to all, but those suffering from ADHD like myself will know why I'm mentioning this: tracking whether my teeth have been brushed. Obviously, this doesn't just apply to yourself, you can also track whether your children have been brushing their teeth regularly.
Or you could take things in another direction and have the toothbrush being used kick off a series of automations: in the morning, when you first wake up, you might want dim lighting until you arrive in reality, but once the toothbrush is out, you can crank the lux up to make sure you are properly awake. Likewise, at the other end of the day, you could have the toothbrush kick off your evening or bedtime automation.
With every integration, there are at least a handful of people somewhere making use of them—or there would be no reason for it to exist—but I predict that this one will gain broader adoption. This is especially true if you are running the Home Assistant Operating System on a Raspberry Pi, as it will use the Bluetooth radio to automatically pick up and integrate your toothbrush.
