New Dental Tech Can Tell When You're Scared
Chairs at a high-tech dental center will record patient stress levels and attempt to standardize dentistry.
By Laura Yan
What if your chair at the dentist could tell the practitioner when you’re stressed? According to The Outline, dentists at Columbia University’s Center for Precision Dental Medicine wants to remake the often dreaded dentist visit into something more comfortable.
Visitors to the high-tech dental center gets assigned an RFID-enabled wristband that identifies them throughout the visit. RFID tags track practitioners and dental equipment, too, measuring when, where and how long instruments are used, as well patient whereabouts. In the next six months, the center will add a new feature to track patient stress: chairs will start measuring patients’ pulse and oxygenation levels.
Instead of waving down a dentist while you suffer in pain, data will be able to alert the practitioner right away. Cameras installed in the chair will record procedures for analysis, and could be someday equipped with facial recognition software to better detect stress or pain levels. Logging patient heart rates over time can give practitioners a sense of a patient’s overall health, too. “The biology of a person is actually best understood under stress,” Christian Stohler, Dean of the College of Dental Medicine at Columbia, told The Outline. “If someone is more vulnerable to stressful situations, they might be subject to a host of diseases aggravated by stress. If you understand a person’s resilience to stress, you may be able to understand what it means for the progression of disease.”
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a22580688/new-dental-tech-can-tell-when-youre-scared/
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