Dental Fembot

The robotic dental simulator featured early in this video from the International Robot Exhibition has a healthy gag reflex, and will moan in pain if the dental student accidentally touches a nerve.

Simroid, a robotic dental patient with an eerily realistic appearance, has been spotted at the 2007 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. Designed primarily as a training tool for dentists, the fembot patient can follow spoken instructions, closely monitor a dentist’s performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to mouth pain. Because Simroid’s realistic appearance and behavior motivate people to treat her like a human being, as opposed to an object, she helps dental trainees learn how to better communicate with patients.

Pink TentacleMade by Kokoro Company, also the makers of the DER2 receptionist and guide robot, she is not to be confused with Honey Doll, who also moans--but for different reasons. ;-)

Tools such as this should provide medical, dental, and nursing students with helpful feedback, before performing painful and delicate procedures on actual patients. We are not far from the day when pre-clinical training--including online VR with haptics feedback and realistic simulators--will better prepare the next generation of health care students for a more technologically advanced future.

Update: This Eurekalert newsrelease describes the work of a UCLA mathematician who devises algorithms for state of the art VR surgical simulations for training surgeons:

Making virtual surgery a reality will require solving mathematical equations, as well as making progress in computational geometry and computer science. An applied mathematician, Teran works in these fields; he develops algorithms to solve equations. Advances by Teran and other scientists in computational geometry, partial differential equations and large-scale computing are accelerating virtual surgery.

How human tissue responds to a surgeon, Teran said, is based on partial differential equations. Teran solves on a computer the mathematical equations that govern physical phenomena relevant to everyday life.