Realistic Robot Designed For Dental Students 59
Zothecula writes "Tokyo's Showa University has unveiled its latest robotic dental patient. The University engaged robotics company Tmsuk to manufacture the realistic bot which is designed to simulate a number of typical patient gestures and responses, allowing dental students to experience what it's like to work with a real patient."
OT: What a coincidence (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, talk about coincidences. A couple days ago I was flying on ANA from Narita to Chicago, and the in-flight entertainment system had a video about how TMSUK came to be. They were showing the very dental simulator talked about here. TMSUK was started by a very colorful guy who had liberal arts background and wanted to be an archeologist (among other things). TMSUK was a spinoff company from what a production line machinery (conveyor etc) business IIRC.
Side note: those "inspirational" videos on ANA's in-flight entertainment are quite well done. On my way there I watched the one about the ABC Cooking School and the lady who started it. Quite ingenious of a system they have. While in Japan, I ran into one of those cooking schools in a shopping center, so I signed up for a lesson online using Google translate (ha!). Nothing beats learning cooking in Japanese, without anyone speaking more than a couple words of English (and me knowing no Japanese either). It was an experience I'd repeat in a heartbeat, though.
Re:What happened to poor people (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was young I had a crappy dentist who did lots of terrible work on my mouth.
When I was just out of college and unemployed all the crappy dental work started to fall apart.
A dental school gave me free dental work (I only had to pay for certain materials) fixed my teeth and I provided excellent training for several future dentists. All supervised by experienced dental professors. My current dentist tells me the work is excellent, and I paid nearly nothing for it.
So deriding the system of dental schools providing free/cheap work for the poor is really a non-starter. Even the work done by real dentists can be utter crap if they are alcoholic shitbags like my childhood dentist. But of course we "had" to go to him because he was the one dentist who went to our church. (Which may explain part of my hatred of organized religion as well.) At least the dental students are supervised.