Research Projects

Development of masticatory robots or chewing robots is an important goal in nutrition, food science and in dental research. The mastication or chewing process involves the complex breakdown of foods with the teeth, tongue, saliva etc playing an active and important role. In order to characterize the food dynamics, understand its influence on teeth and quantitatively assess its effects, measurements of food breakdown, forces acting on teeth and mandibular movements during the entire mastication process must be made continuously. A masticatory robot has been proposed to reproduce the human mastication process which will help to quantitatively assess food texture changes, recording of chewing/ biting forces and testing of dental implants. The proposed masticatory robot comprises dual stepper motors which will assist in opening, closing and chewing motion of the mouth. Forces acting on teeth during chewing of food can be determined using force sensors (Piezoresistive films/flexiforce sensors) placed on the upper jaw. In prior work, masticatory robots that have been developed have not been able to fully mimic the actual mastication process of the human mouth along with the environmental conditions such as saliva, temperature, effect of smoke, alcohol on teeth. In addition, they use bulky sensors such as load cells to measure the forces acting on teeth, putting severe design constraints on the robots. None of the masticatory robots developed had a device for holding the food inside the mouth during the mastication process. The development of a pumping device for pumping artificial saliva and a container of the to prevent food from falling outside, along with inlets for connection to the pumping device to feed in artificial saliva will help in implementing a more realistic human masticatory process. Use of Piezoresistive films/flexiforce sensors for measuring the forces acting on teeth will be a new innovation that hasn't been tried in past work. The developed in vitro instrument will serve as a cost effective way of analyzing the dental condition in humans which can be used for testing of prosthetic bridges, trauma for occlusion, study of bruxism and study of restorative material for dental implants.