MACAU SAR: The term “haptics” means “relating to the sense of touch”. Haptic perception strongly relies on the forces experienced during touch and movement. While touch is considered to be the earliest sense to develop after birth, it is the least understood sense compared with other sensory modalities such as sight and hearing.
Dental education is a discipline in which a significant proportion of preclinical training requires trainees to depend primarily on tactile sensations to achieve a high level of precision. This makes haptics ideally suited for all kinds of dental training systems that will teach, provide practice in and improve tactile skills. Addition of haptics to dental training simulators is very important because it allows trainees to feel what the instructor is feeling.
The ideal dental training simulators should provide sensations similar to those felt when executing the same procedure on a real tooth. Manikin-based dental training simulators, such as DentSim, allow procedures to be performed using real dental instruments; therefore, tactile feedback involved in simulated procedures is naturally provided.
However, most manikin-based dental simulators use only disposable plastic teeth for training.
While manikins and their plastic teeth are becoming more realistic and coming closer to simulating the real feel of actual teeth, it is still difficult to provide the level of detail and material properties of real teeth (enamel, dentine, pulp, or carious lesions). Using real teeth with such systems might be possible, but there are still problems regarding availability of extracted teeth in various conditions, rules and regulations about how they can be used, and standardisation.
The alternative dental simulation currently being developed and investigated by few research groups is haptic-enabled virtual reality dental training. In this kind of system, the trainee holds a haptic device stylus, which is a virtual representation of real dental tools and executes movements over virtual models of projected or on-screen human teeth. The simulator feedback represents topological changes in the tooth structure and forces in the hand of the trainee, which makes it possible to feel what is on a computer monitor or a projected image. Some of these simulators use reconstructed virtual teeth from CT images of real teeth to simulate the tissues that form the tooth structure or even caries. However, simulating realistic force sensations for different dental materials, instruments, and procedures is very challenging and still an active area of research. Force-computing techniques currently used vary from basic spring force models to sophisticated methods involving CT density value and torque.
Commercially available haptic virtual reality dental training systems include Simodont Dental Trainer (Moog) and VOXEL-MAN Dental.
There is still room for improvement for both types of simulator in terms of haptic sensation. The manikin-based simulators will benefit from much more realistic plastic teeth that are not prohibitively expensive, and the virtual reality simulators need a novel, high-fidelity force-computing algorithm.
LONDON, UK: For dentists in training, options for honing their skills have been historically limited to phantom heads or patients at university dental ...
PRAGUE, Czech Republic: Two weeks ago, the world of endodontics met in the German capital of Berlin for ROOTS SUMMIT 2018, which proved an overall ...
BIRMINGHAM, Ala./IRVINE, Calif., U.S.: Researchers from different U.S. universities have collaborated to investigate a novel dental gel, produced by ...
MELBOURNE, Australia: For more than a year at this point, almost all dental events have been held online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In countries ...
MADRID, Spain: For several years now, the European Federation of Periodontology (EFP) has been campaigning for the practice of periodontics to be given ...
SILVER SPRING, Md. & FORT COLLINS, Colo., USA: Human efficacy trials for a new dental anestethic that comes without the painful process of having to ...
Tooth structure preservation is the best way to avoid more invasive therapies. In young patients especially, more conservative techniques should be applied....
NEW YORK, U.S.: Image Navigation has announced a new image-guided implant (IGI) dentistry system that extends the use of CBCT scanners to include ...
SAN JOSE, Calif, U.S.: Now in its ninth year of providing funding, global medical device company Align Technology recently announced 11 new recipients of ...
A dental restoration is not just an aesthetic restoration; it must fulfil many more requirements and integrate perfectly into the existing system. In this ...
Live webinar
Thu. 18 July 2024
8:00 pm EST (New York)
Live webinar
Tue. 6 August 2024
6:00 pm EST (New York)
Live webinar
Tue. 13 August 2024
7:00 pm EST (New York)
Live webinar
Wed. 14 August 2024
12:30 pm EST (New York)
Live webinar
Wed. 21 August 2024
9:00 am EST (New York)
Dr. Jim Lai DMD, MSc(Perio), EdD, FRCD(C)
Live webinar
Wed. 28 August 2024
8:00 pm EST (New York)
Live webinar
Mon. 2 September 2024
5:00 am EST (New York)
To post a reply please login or register