But Northcutt, 65,
said he lost tens of thousands of dollars trying to sell his product
and has all but given up on headgear as a way of correcting
overbites.
"The profession as a whole has migrated from headgear," he said
from his office in Milpitas, California. "In most cases, it's the
wrong modality."
He says OrthoKinetics may be gearing up for a letdown.
"It probably won't do very well," he said. "I think that company
is kind of backtracking."
Jacobson isn't worried.
He says orthodontists are enamored with the headgear, and because
it only costs about $30 a pop, it is still the most effective way to
correct an overbite.
"You could punch someone in the face but not move their teeth,
but if you gently push over a long period of time, [the results] are
amazingly good."
And his system is better than Northcutt's, he said.
"He had the right idea. But he was 20 years too early and it was
large, relatively inaccurate, cumbersome, and the batteries didn't
last long," Jacobson said.
What's more, he said, enterprising kids just hooked up the
headgear to their teddy bears to trick the device.
Jacobson says his headgear is nearly fraud-proof. But its intent
is not to scare kids, he said. It's to motivate them to wear it
longer.
"It's not a snitch device, it's persuasive technology," he said.
In fact, one of the product's designers was the electrical
engineer for "Baby Think
it Over," a pregnancy deterrent that experts say is a perfect
example of persuasive
technology specifically designed to change a user's behavior.
Although the 3,000 kids using smart headgear out of the estimated
3 million worldwide who wear the device may not seem like a lot,
Jacobson says it's enough to keep him in business. And he's already
busy working on a monitor that could be embedded into a retainer.
"I think this is just the beginning of a series of devices to do
better, to do what we know we ought to do," he said.
