The design and testing of a force feedback dental simulator

The Iowa Denial Surgical Simulator is a haptic simulator to train dental st udents in the haptic skills of dentistry. The initial design emphasizes the detection of carious lesions. This work describes the software and impleme ntation of the prototype system, the design tradeoffs' and the technical is sues associated with haptic and graphics subsystems. The work also describe s the current system performance, including a for mal evaluation by practic ing dentists and performance measures. A discussion of the limitations of t he current system is followed by an analysis of opportunities to improve th e quality of the simulator. The results should be of interest to designers of medical haptic simulation systems and other simulation designers. (C) 20 01 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.