IRSA

Project dates

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Full title of the project:
Intra-oral Robot for Surgical Assistance

Short name of the project:
IRSA

Date of the award:
29/01/2021

Project duration:
10 months

Lead Company:
Verhaert new products and Services nv (Belgium)

Project Partner(s):
Dental Design sprl (Belgium)

Benkana Interfaces GmbH &Co. KG (Germany)

Abstract

“The objective of the project is to develop a robotic system used by dentists to be able to mill and prepare teeth with micrometre accuracy. In the current dentist procedure, different iterative steps are needed to provide patients with restorations. This is a very expensive & painful procedure for the patient and a high workload for the dentists. If more than one tooth needs to be treated this process of different visits needs to be repeated. Note that the drill/prep process is much clinician performances dependent. Also as the ultimate objective of this novel process is the elimination of bad or poor quality preparations executed by the majority of clinicians. Which de facto will influence the quality and sustainability of the restoration that comes on top. Extrapolating to patient benefit is receiving high precision prep, best fit, better quality restoration.

The company Dental Design developed a disruptive and innovative new digital process to cope with these challenges. To prepare the teeth a robotic system will be developed to mill on a µm-level accuracy.

The most important robotic challenges in the implementation of a µm-level accurate intra-oral milling robot are the design/adaptation of a suitable robot and the registration and tracking of the position of the treated tooth/mouth during the whole procedure and in a comfortable way to the patient. To cope with these challenges the following interesting technologies from outside the healthcare robotics will be transferred:
· An (adapted) industrial robotic system of the company Staübli will be the basis for the accurate milling process.
· A second potential additional technology transfer could be the use of touch probes which are used in a broad scale of industrial application and this for the localization of the patient/teeth.

Combining these technologies and adapting to the needs of the dental application will give us the opportunity to have a cost-effective robotic system for the new and state-of-the-art procedure. This new disruptive procedure will drastically reduce the cost & comfort for the patients and the health insurance institutes/government and reduce the workload of the dentists.”