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When dental professor Maxine Strickland first started thinking about an invention for her students, she says she didn't think about being an inventor.
"Honestly, I never really thought about being an inventor," she tells Today.
But she has, thanks to a Rutgers TechAdvance Dentistry grant and the feedback of her patients, now has a patent for MaxVac, a handheld device that combines a toothbrush's suction power with a patient's ability to swallow.
"That was the beginning of my experience thinking about this type of intervention because many of the patients had difficulty swallowing," says Strickland, who worked in a pediatric office and later set up a dental clinic for disabled patients as a faculty member at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, which became part of Rutgers in 2013.
She says many dentists use suction devices while brushing patients' teeth, and she wondered, "Why not combine these two pieces of equipment in one piece of equipment?" With Rutgers TechAdvance Dentistry's help, she turned her idea into a handheld device that snaps onto an existing toothbrush and is smaller and easier to hold, and now has four versions that are smaller and easier to hold.
Her ultimate goal is to see MaxVac widely available in stores alongside other dental products, and perhaps even in spacecraft
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