Oral Hygiene Plaque Control Heat Map

OVERVIEW

• The only clinical record that can support customized oral hygiene instructions
• Be able to visually track the improvement and progression of an oral hygiene therapy

BACKGROUND

Maintaining optimal oral hygiene level has several benefits to each individual. It is not only a preventive measure but also therapeutic for oral, periodontal, and systemic health. Conventional dental plaque index has several limitations. Some only provide an averaged score and the other only revealed a dichotomy record that both cannot prioritize where the worse and troublesome areas are for clinical implications. This has significant shortcoming for clinical application, especially to provide customized and targeted oral hygiene instructions. Individualized oral plaque control heat map (PCHM) can improve the clinical record to capture both special and quantitative relationship of the residual plaque and to give the levels of attention that we need. 

Since improvement on oral hygiene relies on several dental visits for reinforcement of different oral hygiene aids and methods, each visit patient should present with evolving plaque accumulation patterns as a natural course of an effective oral hygiene therapy. PCHM provide a foundation for customized oral hygiene instructions and strong motivating visual tool for each patient visit. Implementing PCHM in dental education and clinic offers a direct visual aid for students, clinicians and patients to recognize trouble areas and monitor the improvement throughout the process for a successful customized oral hygiene therapy.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

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Customized Oral Hygiene Therapy

Oral Hygiene Plaque Control Heat Map is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.