TECH

Dental robots are past the demo stage

We may not have flying cars just yet, but robots that can improve the efficiency of dental practices are coming along nicely.

What happened: A clinical team recently reported using a robot to prepare teeth for crowns in a six-patient pilot of a robotics system made by Perceptive, a Boston-based dental technology company. The crowns were made before the robot shaped the teeth to match a digital plan, speeding up the overall treatment.

• Five of six crowns fit well enough to be permanently cemented at the treatment visit. The sixth was used as a temporary crown. No adverse events were recorded through one week of follow-up.

• Perceptive, which is backed by PDS Health (and Mark Zuckerberg’s dad), says that the technology could eventually be used to complete a restorative dental procedure in 15 minutes with only one visit.

Zoom out: Perceptive isn’t the only robotics company making waves in dental. A number of other players are developing hardware that promises to dramatically increase efficiency across the industry. 

• Neocis reported earlier this year that clinicians had performed more than 100,000 osteotomies using its Yomi platform, which is the only FDA-cleared robotic system for dental implant surgery.

• France’s Lupin Dental announced a €15 million funding round last month to develop its robot that prepares teeth for veneers.

• ALLSTAR, a device sold by Germany’s SCHEU-DENTAL, allows clinics to produce aligners in-house at a pace of up to 96 aligners in 24 hours.

Why it matters: As dental robotics mature, the potential payoff for DSOs is getting more care out of the people, chairs, and locations they already have. If robots can shorten appointments or take repetitive work off the clinical team’s plate, practices could treat more patients without adding the same amount of staffing or space.

• The crown example shows how that could happen. While same-day crowns are already a thing, they usually take somewhere between one and three hours. Bringing that to under an hour across a busy network of practices adds up to significantly more capacity.

• More advanced robotics also could change the relationship between practices and their suppliers. Groups with enough demand for aligners, for example, might opt to bring more production under their own roof, gaining control over turnaround times and potentially keeping more of the revenue from each case.

What’s next: Watch  for larger veneer and crown trials, simpler implant workflows, and microrobots that could target bacteria in hard-to-reach root canals—an innovation that’s admittedly much further away but potentially even more revolutionary. One date to keep an eye on is October 13, when this year’s China Dental Show, which is expected to feature advances in robotics front and center, gets under way.