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1General Introduction, Outline and Aims13A study performed at a department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in Groningen, The Netherlands, compared their oldest retrievable outpatient agendas (1996) with more recent agendas (2014) to find a significant increase in referrals for simple tooth extractions. Although data is lacking, they propose that a lowered exposure to clinical training (number of teeth removed per student) might be one of the reasons that explain the increase in referrals. Furthermore, it is advocated that straightforward extractions should take place at the general dentist’ office for several reasons for which rising costs in healthcare is an important one [10].Aims and outline of this thesisThe aim of this thesis is to improve our fundamental knowledge of tooth removal. Robot technology is used to overcome previous challenges in gaining high quality data regarding forces, torques and movements. We aim to gain data in high frequency and in all relevant directions and to use modern machine learning techniques to improve our understanding of this complex data. Improved fundamental knowledge has the potential to lay a foundation for the design of new, evidence-based educational methods. In Chapter 2 and 3, results of an extensive literature review are presented, regarding the use of robot technology in all fields of dentistry. The quality of the literature is evaluated as well as the Technological Readiness Levels of the proposed robot systems. In Chapter 4, our proposed measurement setup is presented, including the design challenges, considerations and preliminary testing results. Chapter 5 and 6 present the results of our measurement campaign, which was performed on fresh frozen cadavers. Results on forces and torques are presented in a descriptive manner in chapter 4 and rotations in chapter 5. A classification model, to make use of the complex data as a whole, is presented in Chapter 7. Tom van Riet.indd 13 26-10-2023 11:59