Page 30 - Demo

Chapter 228Where some basic research articles might describe well-designed experiments, most articles in the epidemiological and clinical research groups were, overall, very limited in their design. Only a few observational studies described the effectiveness of a workflow containing robot technology compared to the conventional workflows [16, 24, 27, 32, 36-38]. One prospective interventional study could be included [104]. No cost-effectiveness studies were found. The overall quality of literature in this review should be considered as low. In more than half (55%) of all included studies the technology readiness of the initiatives did not exceed level three, a proof of concept. One quarter (24%) of the described technology was validated in either a laboratory setting or relevant environment and 13% of all articles described a workflow containing commercially available robot technology. It is important to realize that, especially concerning technology in the higher TRL levels, often the same robot technology is described in more than one paper of which the Suresmile system is an example as it used in eight articles. These findings are in accordance with the recent article by Grischke et al. [8] which described 49 articles, of which approximately 75% did not reach a level of technology readiness higher than level three [8]. With 76% of all first authors having a technological background and 30% of all papers lacking an author with a dental or medical background the average article has a strong technological character. The authors emphasize that, for successful development of technology in dentistry, clinicians should be more involved in the process.According to the demographic findings (Figure 2), well over half of all included articles was from either China or Japan (East Asia). It must be noted that some included articles seem to have similar research data published either in a different journal or in another language. These studies were included in the overview nevertheless, which might cause an overestimation of results originating in East Asia. Another finding in this study was the limited number of articles (12) describing robots interacting with humans [24, 35-37, 39-44, 102, 104]. In the last 20 years, all projects avoid direct contact between a robot and human subject, except for a recent case report with implantology robot Yomi. Tom van Riet.indd 28 26-10-2023 11:59