“Oral Healthcare Education Device for Visually Impaired Children
Chandigarh April 7, 2022
PATENT GRANTED
for
“Oral Healthcare Education Device for Visually Impaired Children
Professors of UIET, Panjab University and PGIMER, Chandigarh have been granted patent for Oral Healthcare Educational Device for Visually Impaired Children. The device is associated to providing oral health education to visually impaired kids in different languages on tactile sensing.
The team consists of Prof Naveen Aggarwal, Prof Manoj Kumar Sharma, Parminder Singh from UIET, PU and Dr Manoj Kumar Jaiswal, Prof Ashima Goyal of PGIMER, Chandigarh. Educating visually impaired children about oral healthcare can be a difficult task for pediatric dentists since they cannot visualize different dental diseases. To overcome this challenge and providing the visually impaired children equal opportunity of oral healthcare, the team envisaged this device.
The invention relates to an apparatus and a system for providing oral healthcare education to visually impaired persons. 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. 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. Thus, 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
The team is looking forward to use of this device for training of visually impaired children, which is being developed with support from Design Innovation Centre (DIC), UIET, Panjab University. In order to make device at bigger level and for use in masses, the university is exploring the possibility of private players joining for promoting this device.
