A toothbrush has become one of the most important pieces of tech in my smart home, thanks to Home Assistant

With smart home ventures (powered by Home Assistant), I've been playing with a lot of sensors and software integrations to get as much data as possible and automate as much as I can. It's been working really well, and with the addition of Bluetooth to my Home Assistant server, I've been able to control and collect data from even more devices. Weirdly, this has included my toothbrush, which has managed to become a vital part of my smart home. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out.

The day I moved my Home Assistant to a Home Assistant OS instance on a Proxmox server, it immediately picked up a lot of different devices on my network that it could integrate with. From a Xiaomi motion-detection night light to my Huawei Sound speaker with DLNA, it helped me configure more connections that have been incredibly useful in my home. However, after brushing my teeth that night and opening Home Assistant, I noticed something pretty funny... it had detected my toothbrush and offered to install the Oral-B integration.

To defend myself a little bit here before getting into how this turned out to be useful, I did not purchase a toothbrush because of its Bluetooth capabilities​​​​​. Truth be told, my toothbrush, the Oral-B Smart Series 7000, was on sale at Christmas and was simply one of the best offers at the time when I bought it. I knew it had Bluetooth, but I shrugged that off as a ridiculous feature that was simply surplus to requirements. Let me be clear: it's a toothbrush. Why on Earth does it need Bluetooth? When Home Assistant picked it up, I looked out of mere curiosity to see what it had detected, not expecting to find anything useful.

And then, unfortunately, I had some ideas.

What's the first thing you do every day?

If the answer was "brush your teeth", then you'll see why this is useful

I was telling a friend about the fact that my Home Assistant server had picked up on my smart toothbrush when I was brushing my teeth that morning, laughing about how silly it was that there even was an integration in the first place. That's not to disparage the work done by the developers in incorporating it either, but it's a toothbrush. A toothbrush supporting Bluetooth communication in the first place is amusing. I was talking about how when I wake up in the morning and go to brush my teeth, I've barely interacted with any technology at that point, so I don't even see the need for it. And then I realized, as I was speaking, that it could turn out to be incredibly useful. If I use my toothbrush in the morning first thing when I get up, and Home Assistant now has a way to tell when I'm up and out of bed based on my toothbrush...

You see where I'm going with this. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

After some tinkering and identifying what details my toothbrush surfaces and how I could use them, I settled on the following pieces of information that I could reasonably integrate into my smart home that would be generally useful.

• Battery level
• Sector
• Time spent brushing teeth

The most confusing of these was the "Sector" entity, though the documentation is pretty clear on this. Essentially, by default, this particular toothbrush will buzz every 30 seconds to let you know you're a quarter through brushing your teeth, and will buzz three times when you hit two minutes. The "sector" goes up to a value of four, with one being the first 30 seconds, and four being finished. You could use this to track when you're finished brushing your teeth, or to track how much longer is left.

However, the truly useful part of this integration isn't even related to any specific entity that's exposed in Home Assistant. With this, you can track when the user is brushing their teeth as it will suddenly start reporting data, and in my case, because brushing my teeth is the first thing I do every morning, it works as a true way to tell when exactly my day is "starting." If I'm brushing my teeth, it means I'm out of bed. I can't always use my alarm for tracking this, especially at weekends, as sometimes I may wake up and take a bit to get out of bed. But if I'm brushing my teeth? That's my day getting started.

So, if I can signal that my day is starting based on an event (in this case, brushing my teeth), I can track state changes collected from my toothbrush to automate all kinds of morning processes. That can include getting a notification of when my first call is that day, what tasks I need to complete, turning on my coffee machine (using a FingerBot), and sending a wake-on-LAN packet to my computer so that when I'm finished brushing my teeth, my computer is already on and ready. This is pretty easy to do by simply listening to state changes from my toothbrush's brush time entity, though I needed to create a daily helper variable to ensure that it only runs once a day, as otherwise it will run every time the state of my toothbrush changes.

It unfortunately works really well

I can't believe a Bluetooth toothbrush is useful

To be honest, I'm almost annoyed that this works as well as it does. I always found it hilarious that my toothbrush had Bluetooth, yet it's somehow become an important part of my smart home as a great indicator for when I'm actually up and moving about. I'm sure there's more that I can do with this as well, but as I implemented more and more based on it, I realized that there are a lot of feasible ways to make use of this data, and more than just a way to tell when I'm actually out of bed.

Most other uses simply don't apply to me, but I began thinking of ways that it could be used in general for quality-of-life improvements. As an example, those who may suffer from memory issues could use this as a great way to remind themselves to brush their teeth, and parents could use it as a way to ensure that their young kids are brushing their teeth. The battery tracking can also be a great way to remind you to charge it, especially if you also have your calendar in Home Assistant and a trip is happening within a certain number of days. That last one is something I'm looking to set up at the moment.

While I still think it's a bit ridiculous that a toothbrush has Bluetooth, it's also admittedly hilarious that it can actually be useful, especially when paired with Home Assistant. I had paired it wth the official Oral-B app on my phone when I first got it just to see what it had, but there wasn't much useful in there. This, though, has suddenly become an integral part of my smart home, and has been a great way to ensure that my morning processes happen consistently when I'm actually up and out of bed, rather than straight away with my alarm.