A basic study for development of dental chair in order to decrease burden of patient

Abstract

Dental chairs are required to be comfortable for patients and highly operational for dentist, but currently there are some problems. Patients basically have to keep their position long time during operation. However dental chairs have been developed mainly based on the viewpoints of dentist so far. And also, there are few objective numerical indexes to develop comfortable dental chair. From the background, we aimed to set up objective indexes which correspond with subjective evaluation. We chose cushions for dental chair by measuring hardness of material, and then the experiment was conducted. Comfort ratings, body pressure distribution and subjective evaluation were evaluated in the experiment. In conclusion, significant differences were not found among the selected cushion combinations. The reasons are thought to be short duration of sitting for evaluation and narrow range of cushion hardness. Because of those causes, participants seemed to be able to distinguish the differences.