Real patients have a way of doing inconvenient things such as gagging, bleeding, and fainting. Their mouths don’t offer the ideal place for students to practice their preparation techniques. So for years, dental schools have struggled for ways to realistically simulate dentistry. Now, digital technology is making some professors hopeful that the next generation of students will better know what to do when real human beings "open wide."
Among the new types of simulation are computer games, patient profiles created on social media, virtual reality simulations, computers that track handpiece movements as they cut plastic teeth, and haptic devices that give tactile feedback. The innovations not only spare real patients the agony of an inexperienced practitioner, they also offer a way of holding the attention of a new generation.
"Students have grown up in an environment of video games," says Parag Kachalia, DDS, Vice Chair of Simulation, Technology, and Research at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco, California. "They manipulate images on an iPad®, an Xbox®, or PlayStation®. If it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and a student wants to develop their hand skills and work with a video game-type module, they should be able to work in an Xbox-type world of being able to prepare teeth and have a response system that’s built into it."
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