Meet the dental robot for tooth drilling

A new dental robot is being developed right now at the University of Basel in Switzerland to help

with tooth drilling. Meet MER, short for Miniature Intraoral Robot. It's about the size of a wine

cork and designed to fit inside a patient's mouth. To accomplish this, larger components like the

motor and controls are kept outside the mouth and connected to the robot by cables and a drive shaft

like what's used in cars to transfer motion from the motor to the wheels. To be perfectly honest

I cringed pretty hard thinking about what might happen if the patient moves their head too fast

but the team actually planned for that. The robot is mounted to a custom-fitted dental splint which

attaches to the teeth, so if the patient moves their head, the robot moves with it. No getting

away from this dentist drill. The process starts with a wider drill that removes the surface of the

tooth. Then a longer and thinner drill does more detailed work. So far it's been tested on fake

ceramic teeth in a fake patient's mouth, and the team plans to add sensors in a camera

so that the robot can keep track of its position even during a power outage Researchers hope that MER will make the cavity filling process easier for both patients and dentists Usually several appointments are

needed to complete this kind of procedure, one to scan the affected tooth, one to remove the damaged

area, and a final one to install the permanent crown. MER could allow dentists to do the drilling

and the placement in the same visit. Dentists can pre-plan exactly how the robot removes the tooth

material to order a crown before drilling, meaning less visits to the dentist for patients and more

time to see other patients for the dentist. Surgical robots are becoming more common in

multiple fields of medicine. Neuralink designed its entire brain implant process around a surgical

robot. And histotripsy, a process for destroying tumors with sound waves, also uses a similar

scanning and targeting machine to liquefy tumors in a non-invasive way. To see our in-depth demo

and explainer on the device that destroys tumor with sound waves, click here. Would you go to a

robot dentist? Let us know down in the comments and subscribe for more stories that make you say

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