PU, PGIMER get patent for oral health education device

Panjab University’s representatives on Thursday said the University Institute of Engineering and Technology (UIET) and Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) professors have been granted a patent for an oral healthcare educational device for the visually impaired children.

The device, associated with providing oral health education to visually impaired kids in different languages on tactile sensing, was created by a team consisting of Naveen Aggarwal, Manoj Kumar Sharma, Parminder Singh of UIET, PU, and Manoj Kumar Jaiswal, Ashima Goyal of PGIMER.

“Educating visually impaired children about oral healthcare can be a difficult task for paediatric dentists since they cannot visualise different dental diseases. To overcome this challenge and provide the visually impaired children equal opportunity of oral healthcare, the team envisaged this device,” varsity said in an official communique.

The apparatus comprises a dental model having diseased and healthy teeth, inflamed and healthy gingival tissues, a sensor associated with the teeth and the gingival tissues of the dental model and a control unit in communication with the sensor.

“The control unit comprises a memory to store educational information related to the dental model and when a visually impaired person touches the dental model, the sensor sends a signal to the control unit which retrieves relevant information from the memory and sends to an output unit for the announcement,” varsity representatives said, adding that a visually impaired person gets oral healthcare education by touching and listening to different healthy and diseased teeth and gingival tissues of the dental model. Hindustan Times