We believe dental check-ups should be free, fast and more accessible - not a privilege. Pearlii uses AI image processing to scan dental photos, taken at home with your smartphone camera. Download our beta App, please share your feedback 💕
Pearlii is an investor-backed, dentaltech startup in Melbourne, Australia.
Personally - I've got shit teeth. I grew up in a lower-socioeconomic household in outback Australia. I've since learned that almost all dental problems are preventable with regular check-ups and good oral hygiene, so I'm now scrupulous about my oral health, but a lot of damage was already done.
With Pearlii, I'm trying to prevent this happening to anyone else.
Healthy teeth shouldn't be a privilege and no kid should have to grow up with bad teeth. A free dental screening and education app like Pearlii has the potential to shift the landscape, spotting problems earlier and boosting oral health literacy.
Pearlii is still in beta mode, but we have big plans - so please follow our story. In future, we will add many more features, such as scanning for more and more oral diseases, adding rich educational content created by our Dentists, tracking your teeth whitening and straightening, while the ultimate goal is to create seamless referral pathways (e.g. book a dentist appointment).
So, while we understand that we still have loads of work to do, now is a good time to start collecting real feedback from Users. And where else better than Product Hunt? :)
@kyle_t Hi Kyle,
First of all congratulation to you, and to the whole Pearlii team.
I am documenting journey of individuals who are innovating, inventing, and creating things in general, through out the world.
The proposal is to do a short interview, capture it in video, and let it out to the world, so that others can get inspiration. And, at the same time you and your team will get acknowledgement for the hustle.
I would like to request you to please let me know when you are available so that we can discuss this in more detail at tellmeaboutit510{at}gmail.com .
Thanks, and good luck!
Subodh
@kyle_t congratulations to you and the team for coming up with such a brilliant app for dental health. Being a dentist I know that people avoid treatments unless there is a pain but with such a great app they will be motivated to get routine checkups with just a click. Current world is tech-savvy and with "Pearlii" for oral health we can do a lot to prevent oral and maxillofacial disease.Looking forward to bright future for dentistry and would love to contribute in development of this dental technology in the best possible way.
How does this app recognise hidden caries? My wife is a dentist and when I showed her this post and the video, that was her first question. If that's not detected by the app and someone acctually has caries, but everything else is fine, the app might be misleading and postponing the vist of the dentist making the situation even worst. I'm really courious about this question.
I'm not really representative person to test the app as I do not have a single filling.
@gregor_goslar Hi Gregor, great question!
I would like to first note that I'm an epidemiologist by trade and a lecturer in public health at the University of Melbourne. I'm committed to doing this responsibly - improving access to dental screening and education is why I started Pearlii.
Secondly, I want to stress that this is just our beta. We're setting up validity and reliability clinical trials to be run through the University of Melbourne Dental School to fully understand our tech's capabilities and limitations. We have two dentists working at Pearlii, while we're regularly in touch with peak dental bodies here in Australia. We've also tried to be really careful with the language we use in the App so to not overstate - particularly as we're only in beta mode.
Pearlii will always promote going to the Dentist in person as the gold standard. This said, it's important to know that many people only go to the dentist once they experience pain or clear signs of damage, and they miss the prevention window. For example, in Australia 65% of adults have not been to the dentist in the last two years. It is a huge, underserved, and costly public health problem in many countries around the world.
For comparison, perhaps look at the success of mental health apps - many with +50m downloads - people generally know that visiting a psychologist in person is the gold standard. However, it is expensive, inconvenient, and has some associated stigma / fear, so many people don't bother going at all. Dentistry has very similar barriers; it costs on average US$288 for dental check-ups and it takes hours out of a persons day, not to mention the associated fear / distrust towards dentists. While not perfect, Pearlii goes some way to overcoming all of these barriers.
I can go on and on about the failures in today's public dental system, but Pearlii will offer people worldwide - importantly those who don't go to the dentist (for whatever reason) - free, fast and convenient dental screening and education.
I should also note that our early machine learning results are exceeding our earlier expectations. It's really amazing what we're able to detect from five dental photos taken with a smartphone (in future, I plan to also nerd out and hopefully build a composite score combining our ML and oral health questionnaire results to strengthen overall dental assessments). We've got loads of other exciting stuff planned, such as low-cost dental screening and education programs, such as in schools and rural and remote communities. But that's probably enough info for one reply!
I hope this goes some way to answering your questions, Gregor.
@kyle_t thank's for your answer. I think you are developing a great app, don't get me wrong on that. And even if it can't detect caries, but does detect gingivitis (which is a problem of over 80% of the population above 60) and advises people to visit their dentist, then the app has done a great job.
@gregor_goslar Thanks Gregor, really appreciate the words of encouragement!
Regarding detection of occlusal caries (decay hidden in between teeth), you're correct that these types of caries are much trickier to detect than surface caries - our questionnaire asks about related symptoms, such as sensitivity to hot or cold temperatures, but we're unlikely to detect early stages of occlusal caries. However, it's worth noting that occlusal caries are also quite challenging for dentists to detect too, even with x-ray. They are usually only reported once they're at moderate to advanced stages. Happy to share links to peer-reviewed literature for more detail.
This is an amazing app! Being a dentist, I know how people avoid coming to the dentist as much as possible and as a last resort (mostly due to pain). For treatment, it gives limited options to the dentist to treat them in turn causing more avoidance in the future.
With this app, this cycle can be broken! Anyone can get dental check-ups done at regular intervals from anywhere! This way we are more aware of our oral health and makes it less daunting to visit the dentist!
Looking forward to its bright future! :)
@rujuta_nikam Thanks Rujuta! Particularly nice to hear from the dentist community!
FYI we're working closely with dentists, in touch with peak bodies in Australia, and we're setting up clinical trials at the University of Melbourne Dental School to make sure we do Pearlii the right way :)
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