DIY Dental Work

Case #10 - Tooth-glove

The standard method for finding an invention to be obvious is: find its individual pieces and think of a plausible reason for putting them together. It’s surprisingly hard to find prior art to knock the teeth off this tooth-glove manufacturing kit. Although the pieces are known, a good pretext for putting them together remains elusive.

This kit comes with a jaw mold with teeth, each of which forms a pocket that accommodates a corresponding natural tooth. It also comes with a thermoplastic strip. The idea is to soften the thermoplastic in hot water, place it in the mold, and bite down, thus forcing the soft thermoplastic into the tooth pockets. Once the thermoplastic hardens, you pull it out of the mold. You now have a rubber tooth-glove for that resilient smile.

Molding thermoplastic to conform to teeth is how you make tooth guards for bruxism and contact sports. But these don’t look at all like teeth. Dentures are known. But they are also hard. After all, you use them to chew.

To reject this claim, an examiner would have to find a believable reason for why you might combine these ideas to make a rubber tooth-glove that looks like a denture but, unlike a denture, isn’t hard enough to chew with.

A variant of this idea is a pair of “tooth mittens,” in which each jaw has one long arcuate pocket so you can have a smile like “Barney.” That would be even harder for an examiner to reject.

You be the examiner. Is it patentable?

Disclaimer:

The O&R “Is it patentable?” blog is educational and provides general information about patent law.  It provides no legal advice or conclusions.  O&R uses publicly available information about the products described in these posts and has no relationship with the manufacturers, sellers, or distributors of these products.  Reading this blog and participating in voting on the case studies does not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader and O&R.