Is dental monitoring becoming an open system in the future?

One of the biggest challenges faced by dentists during orthodontic therapies has a lot to do with how long it takes for the treatment to complete. It is no surprise that orthodontic treatment can often be long-lasting – a kinder way of saying “time-consuming”. This is even further accentuated when undesired side effects arise during the course of treatment or when they go unnoticed for a longer period than they should. On average, it takes less than two years for people with mild to moderate to use clear aligners and see anticipated results.

Experts are consistently looking for newer technologies and methods to “lighten the road” for patients – in an attempt to reduce orthodontic treatment duration and reduce the number of in-person visits to the dental office while still being able to maintain continuity and quality of care. These approaches have aimed to speed up the biological mechanisms involved in tooth movement as well as optimize patient-doctor interaction by avoiding time-wasting round trips. What this has resulted in is a polished model of remote orthodontic care.

Initiated and promoted during the COVID pandemic, the telehealth industry has had a lot of success since. Today, every activity can be found having a “tele” version of it: telework, telemedicine, teledentistry, and now conveniently, teleorthodontics! A step in this direction was made by Dental Monitoring™ – a French company striving to change the way orthodontics works in the new era.

Dental Monitoring – what is it?

Dental Monitoring™ (DM, Dental Monitoring©, Montreal, France) is a software system that captures photos of tooth movement at every stage of the patient’s treatment and then forwards it to their respective doctors. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), this app is designed to allow orthodontists and dentists to maintain control over teeth movement, appliance integrity, and oral hygiene measures of their patients during orthodontic treatment remotely.

This powerful technology leverages the skill of AI and machine learning to optimize Invisalign treatment outcomes, all in the comfort of the patient’s home. Founded in 2013, this one-of-a-kind technology has already garnered more than $50 million in investment for its remote dental platform.

Dental Monitoring™ consists of three components: the Dental monitoring app for the patient, a patented teeth movement-tracking algorithm, and a web-based Doctor Dashboard® where the clinician can check the progress of the patient, in terms of dental angulation, inclination, and intrusion/extrusion. It receives the patient’s pretreatment photographs and a 3D model in stereolithography file format (.stl).

Each time the patient takes an intraoral photograph, they get automatically uploaded to cloud-based servers. DM’s algorithms then link the picture with the 3D model and calculate baseline tooth positions, overjet, overbite, and inter-arch relationships all through the construction of a multidimensional information map (IM) of the teeth.

As much as Dental Monitoring™ is made up of sophisticated software components, it is also made up of hardware components like a cheek retractor. It also comes with a ScanBox – a specially designed smartphone holder that clips magnetically to the retractor, hence ensuring optimal positioning. The next step is for the patient to download the companion app, available for iOS and Android and simply follow the cues to start scanning their smiles.

Is Dental Monitoring the future of teleorthodontics?

To date, Dental Monitoring™ has appeared to be a reliable and promising application that has not only allowed doctors to interact with their patients more regularly but also allow the patients to skip expensive visits to their dental office, some even off schedule. It is straightforward to use and fits in perfectly with the fast-paced nature of today’s world when we are restricted by time and when unnecessary appointments can be avoided.

Dental Monitoring™ has offered a new solution to jam-packed dental office schedules and made patient engagement with their doctors easy and convenient, especially during the holidays. Orthodontics has shown a brilliant leap in technology and innovations as of late and Dental Monitoring™ has been of robust significance. The future of dentistry overall is going to be interesting in this century.