For some dental patients, including kids, just hearing the dental drill is enough to elicit a visceral reaction, but a dental school professor and researchers intend to change that with a quieter one, according to an article published by the Acoustical Society of America.
Since children react differently to the drill’s shrill sounds because they perceive its high-pitched tones as louder and more unpleasant, researchers are testing the acoustics of dental drills with kids and adults to create a prototype that minimizes their characteristic noise while maintaining high performance, according to the article.
“I realized that almost no one -- not even dentists -- was tackling this sound problem scientifically,” Dr. Tomomi Yamada, an assistant professor at the University of Osaka Graduate School of Dentistry, who experienced firsthand the reactions many patients had to the drill, said in the article.
She and colleagues from the University of Osaka, Kobe University, and National Cheng Kung University used Japan’s flagship supercomputer to run acoustic tests on dental drills. Through computer simulations, they visualized how compressed air moves internally and externally around the drill at 320,000 rpm.
In separate tests, the team tested the psychological effects that playing a drill’s high-pitched whining sounds had on adults and children. Dental drills can reach nearly 20 kHz, which is the upper limit of human hearing. Frequencies above 20 kHz are considered ultrasonic. Babies can often hear above 20 kHz, but as humans age, we lose the ability to detect those higher frequencies.
Therefore, unsurprisingly, Yamada found that children experience the sounds differently from adults.
“This indicates that children’s fear of dental sounds is not merely psychological but also physiological in nature. Children truly hear these sounds differently, so their fear of dental treatment is a genuine sensory response, not just imagination,” Yamada said.
She and the team are modifying blade geometry and the drill exhaust port to reduce the distinctive noise while maintaining powerful torque and precision.
“Moving forward, we hope to work with dental manufacturers through industry-academia partnerships, progressing toward commercialization after completing the necessary regulatory and durability testing,” she said.
