Transfer of Manual Dexterity Skills Acquired on the Simodont, a Dental Haptic Trainer with a Virtual Environment, to Reality. A Pilot Study

The goal of dental education is to guide students’ development through different stages from novice to competent, eventually resulting in an expert clinician. Students traditionally devote several years to the acquisition of sufficiently fine manual skills to prepare them for entry-level dental practice. In the current simulation laboratory, training is restricted to non realistic procedures using phantom heads, often on plastic teeth. Dental education, of all the health professional schools, is the discipline that could benefit the most from virtual reality since a significant proportion of preclinical dental education is dedicated to teaching psychomotor skills (1, 2, 3). A simulator, Simodont, (Moog, Nieuw Vennep, the Netherlands and ACTA, Academic Centre of Dentistry Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) consisting of a force feedback robot arm connected to software in such a way that every movement of the arm is visualized on a screen, has been developed to replace the traditional lab conditions by a realistic virtual learning environment (Figs. 1 and 2) The haptics are based on the Moog patented admittance control paradigm for the HapticMaster (4, 5).The simulator TRANSFER OF MANUAL DEXTERITY SKILLS ACQUIRED ON THE SIMODONT, A DENTAL HAPTIC TRAINER WITH A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT, TO REALITY. A PILOT STUDY