Brett: So what we've got today is kind of a working version of the sensing table. So, for example, a scenario might be you’re waiting for a patient to come through, which might be the first patient of the day. You might look up some information, some details of previous appointments or something like that – whatever you need to prepare yourself for the appointment. And then when they come in, they’re seated in the chair and one of the first things you want to do is a fairly general check up of the patient’s mouth. We’ve noticed that some tools that are typically used are the mirror and sickle probe.
Andrew: Yep
Brett: So maybe when you grab these tools of the moveable bench beside your… we just have to…like, when you grab them off, it might, if it’s going to co-operate, load a representation of the patient’s teeth.
Andrew: Oh wow. Wow.
Brett: So then you can work away and look at that and maybe use speech recognition say to look at other things, forward back or chart or soft tissue or something like that.
Andrew: Yep.
Brett: And then maybe you put it down and it goes away or something like that, I’m not sure.
Andrew: Yeah… that’s a very interesting concept. And then like if you pick up a hand piece, a high speed or low speed hand piece, you can go into the chart or the template for doing a filling or a crown, give you a menu, what’re you doing, why’re you using this high-speed hand piece, is it a crown or is it a root canal or that kind of thing.
Brett: So you think there’s a couple of scenarios for you to use something like that?
Andrew: Yeah, yep, for sure. Yep, that’d be great.
Brett: Ok.
Andrew: They already have the sensors on the bracket table.
Brett: So that when you pull them out they turn on, yeah it’s very similar.
Andrew: Yep, very simple to connect up. That’s a really good idea.
Brett: So how accurate is that scenario? Is this something you would do generally?
Andrew: Pretty much. It really depends on the patient and the appointment. Probably half the time we’re doing a check up and we don’t really know what we’re going to be doing. The patient’s booked in with a tooth-ache or a hole or a lost filling or something like that. So I mean we can probably make an assumption it’s a filling but not necessarily and in those cases we always do a checkup. But if they’re a repeat patient and we’ve done a treatment plan for them and they’re going to come back and it’s visit three and we know we’re going to do a few fillings up there… that’s where we know… we don’t generally do an exam.
Brett: Ok.
Andrew: So there could be another parameter – “Is this an existing treatment plan we’re going through?” and in fact PracticeWorks knows that.
Brett: So when I brought up that screen before on the patient. So this has got something like… so let’s recall appointment. Is this the screen that might indicate
Andrew: What it’s going to be. That’s a 40 minute appointment and this is what they’re going to be doing. A 114 which is a clean, a couple of x-rays and a check up.
Brett: For that appointment.
Andrew: Yeah, and obviously if you’ve got a full treatment plan when we make the appointment, we’ll clip on which appointment it is. Because when we do a treatment plan we schedule each appointment every day as well as we can.
Brett: Yep.
Andrew: So it’s already got it on there what it’s doing. So that could also be a cue that the program could use.
Brett: Ok. Cool, well that’s really interesting. And these would… was I right in saying these are typically the tools… I mean, we see the mirror a lot, and
Andrew: The mirror’s used for virtually everything. You can use the sickle probe with the mirror just before starting the filling, just to check “ok, oh this is the area where the decay is” or “do we need to go to the back part of the tooth or only on the front part of the tooth?” But we wouldn’t necessarily be doing a full, I mean, we wouldn’t need to open up an exam for that one, even though we picked up those instruments there.
Brett: Yeah, yep, I think there’d be instances where you picked up the the instruments but didn’t necessarily want to see what was <trails off> But yeah that’s something we’re interested in, and I’m not sure.
Andrew: Yeah the mirror and probe are used for virtually every procedure that we do, even if it’s just for a bit of torture.
<laughter>
Brett: Yeah that’s right, so it’s up and down a lot and I suppose if it’s not on here then it might be still being used. Well we noticed in the dental school they often keep their instruments on the bench as well, so I mean, it might not be being used, but it could be put somewhere else.
Andrew: Yeah. I don’t really have room to put it anywhere else, so if it’s not being used, it’s on the bracket table, but on the odd occasion I’ve found I’ve put it in the dirty area.
Brett: Sorry? The bracket table is the…?
Andrew: The bracket table is our table, that’s what it’s called.
Brett: Oh okay.
Andrew: So I do on occasion find I’ve put it in the dirty area.
Brett: Ok. So we’re just using a lego mindstorms kit, just with three touch sensors and just an infrared connection. So it’s something, you could have this wired into, cause you already have this table wired up to do various things.
Andrew: Yeah it wouldn’t be too much to wire that and add a few sensors or something like that. So that was purely by feel that it recognized you lifted up the mirror and probe… just a touch sensor was it?
Brett: Yeah, the weight in the table just drops – it doesn’t actually know that I’ve picked up the mirror in this case, we’re just picking up 20g or whatever it might be. Yeah that’s the way it’s set up at the moment, but the problem I suppose with trying to detect which instrument is that they’re not always laid out nice and pretty, they can be mixed up and that might even change the weight of the table.
Andrew: Unless they were all encoded with some identifier that told the computer what the instrument was, that’d be very difficult.
Brett: And then you have the problem of not being able to sterilize the tools.
Tim: Unless they’re a different colour or something each, and then you have a camera just detecting the colour.
Brett: So that’s where we at at the moment.
Andrew: Gee I haven’t seen a number 49 plugger in a while. We don’t do amalgams at all, and that’s used virtually exclusively for amalgams.
Brett: Yeah we got these from the dental school.
<conversation>
Andrew: We were talking last time about a mirror with a little screen in it. Have you thought at all about that one?
Brett: It’s something we’ve been thinking about, but we really haven’t…
Tim: A week after we had that discussion there was an article in New Scientist about having a two-way mirror…
Brett: So the technology’s out there, it’s just big I think…
Andrew: Right…
Tim: It’s just about compacting it to something that size.
Andrew: Again, that you can sterilize somehow or other.
Tim: Yeah, they’re bringing out gadgets that charge by induction, so if you could perfectly seal it and then just have the battery get charged by induction it’d be doable – and they’re getting the size of things down.
Brett: Yeah that’s a really interesting idea as well.
Andrew: Yeah, it’d have to be still small and compact – not too thick either. Because sometimes you need it right up the back. And you need it as thin as possible because you want to hold the cheek out of the way and still see and get a drill hand piece up there. If you’ve got that much thicker than it is now, it’s just not much space.
Tim: I’m sure within 10 years, they’ll be cramming electronics into something that size, but all we can do now is create a larger prototype. Something we’ll talk about anyway.
Brett: So that’s the main thing we wanted to talk to you about today.
<conversation>
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