How We Built an AI Gum Scan Tool That Won 3 MARKies Awards

The Problem

Gum disease affects an estimated 94% of Malaysians, yet most oral care conversations are still about teeth. Whitening, straightening, fresh breath. Gum health rarely comes up, and when it does, checking it usually means a clinic visit most people never get around to booking.

Systema, the oral care brand under Southern Lion, wanted to change that. Working with creative agency Muma Malaysia, the brief was to make gum health a mainstream topic. Something people could check in seconds, understand instantly, and actually want to share.

What We Built

TrueXR built the AI Gum Scan, a tool that assesses gum health from a photo taken on an ordinary phone camera. We trained an established computer vision model specifically on gum health imagery, thousands of images, tuned to read the colour and condition of gum tissue, then built the assessment experience around it: point the camera, take the photo, get a read on your gum health in seconds. No clinic, no appointment, no dental tools.

The tool launched on World Gum Health Day 2025 as the centrepiece of the "Gum Health Reveal" campaign, under the banner "The World's First AI-Powered Gum Scan." Key opinion leaders scanned their own gums on camera and shared the results, turning a clinical topic into a public "bare your gums" moment.

None of that works if the tool feels clinical to use. Muma Malaysia led the user experience design, collaborating with TrueXR to map out a flow simple enough to complete without instructions: land on the page, learn what gum colour means, walk through a short tutorial, take the photo, get an instant result, and share it. That journey, shown below, is why an AI health assessment felt like something worth finishing rather than a form to abandon halfway.

Why AI Was the Right Call

A quiz or a checklist could have asked people about their gum health. It couldn't have shown them. The AI scan gave people an actual answer, generated from their own face, in the time it takes to take a selfie. That's what made it shareable rather than just informative, and it's why the campaign found an audience beyond people who were already thinking about oral care.

The Result

The campaign drove 79,000 gum scan engagements, 17.8 million impressions, and a 95% increase in social page visits. At MARKies Malaysia 2026, it won Silver for Most Creative – Artificial Intelligence, Silver for Most Effective Use – Artificial Intelligence, and Bronze for Most Creative – Customer Engagement, all for the same campaign.

Three awards across creativity, effectiveness, and engagement is a rare spread. It means the tool wasn't just a clever idea. It actually worked, and people actually used it.

Where This Fits

This wasn't a VR headset or an AR filter, the kind of project people usually associate with us. It was a health-awareness problem solved with computer vision and shipped as something anyone could use from their phone in seconds. That range is deliberate. Whether the brief calls for AI, AR, VR, or something that doesn't have a category yet, our job is to figure out the right technology for the problem and build it properly, in partnership with the agencies and brands who bring the idea.