The present application is directed to electric toothbrushes. In particular, the present application is directed to electric toothbrushes designed to accommodate or compensate for a wide variety of impediments to oral hygiene, such as restricted range of oral motion or access, or impediments to operation or interaction with traditional cleaning systems and methods, for example, such as may be common with hospitalized people, people living in residential care facilities, bedridden people, and many other patients.
While providing oral hygiene to intubated patients is a technical challenge, doing so is vital for both patients' oral health and overall systemic health and disease prevention. Oral care in an ICU environment is difficult to perform due to physical barriers, such as endotracheal tubes, oral gastric tubes, and bite blocks, that hamper access to the oral cavity. A patient's inability to swallow or expel toothpaste and/or rinsing fluid presents yet another obstacle in providing oral care in such environments.
Various oral care protocols are provided for ICU environments, though little evidence supports implementation of such protocols. For instance, manual toothbrushes have been proposed as the ideal method for promoting oral hygiene of orally intubated patients. Even though foam swabs appear to be inferior in removing oral debris and dried secretions compared to the recommended manual toothbrush, many ICU nurses still use foam swabs since they require less dexterity to manipulate than a toothbrush. Using foam swabs and allowing additional build-up of oral debris and dried secretions can lead to deterioration in a patient's oral health and increased incidence of pneumonia.
Thus, despite the importance of providing effective oral hygiene for ICU patients, effective, easy to use oral care tools for hospital or institutional environments are lacking. This is a major factor as to why oral care protocols, as discussed above, are often incorrectly implemented or ignored altogether.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a toothbrush that minimizes the manual dexterity necessary to clean the teeth and oral cavity of an intubated, hospitalized, or other patient or person in residential care facilities. It would also be desirable to provide a toothbrush capable of instillation of rinsing agents and application of suction, so that a single tool may be used to provide effective oral care.