6 Emerging Technologies that will Change Dentistry Forever
These innovations are already making waves in the broader world-and someday soon, they’ll have huge implications for dentistry.
Each year, new technologies emerge in the dental world that change and improve existing workflows. While some innovations are iterative in nature-think software updates or slight tweaks geared toward improved or faster usability-some new solutions are so big that the promise for drastic change is felt immediately. Consider the first intraoral scanner; the accuracy and results may have left something to be desired, but the potential was obvious.
One of the remarkable things about dental technology is how much it borrows from other industries-CAD/CAM came from the manufacturing sector, and it just took some software tweaks to improve the accuracy. Material revolutions have been helped by breakthroughs in the health care sector, using regenerative materials originally developed for other uses in the body. Technologies that were invented without a thought to dentistry have been pulled over and changed dentistry forever.
With that in mind, here are some consumer and medical technologies currently on the market that have the capacity to shape the dental world for years to come. Some of these technologies have started to come into dentistry, while others are years away-but all of them may change what dentistry is.
