Silent Dental Drill

[nuf]

I was in the dentist office the other day, and the sound of the drill in an adjecent room makes me badly tense. There must be a mechanical person out there who can redesign that tool to reduce that horrible sound. Or maybe use an electronic noise cancelation system to achieve same end result.

Reward: less anxiety in the dentist's office

[Michael D. Grissom]

nuf,.. you hit the nail squarely on the head... "active noise cancellation" is the solution. It has already been done to solve many other similar problems so why not dentist drills. Most of that horrible noise comes from the air exhaust of the pneumatic drill where it is easiest to cancel. The rest comes from the body of the drill where an outer foam handle would kill the remainder. A prototype would be easy to build and demo to your local dentist(s). I think you have a definite win-win here because dentist also hate this the most (taken from article about why dentist suicide rates are almost as high as police officers and psychologist --> the worst). Because it is so simple to do, you really should. I did not disclose any patentable details here so, if it hasn't already been patented (do patent search) then even though it uses existing technology it is an "improvement over existing" and therefore likely patentable. If a patent search comes up clean, you might also consider doing an $80 provisional patent (good one year) and start buying dentist drills, modifying, demonstrating (door-to-door so-to-speak), and selling. You'll probably need an electro-mechanical engineer to design it for you but well worth the money when you succeed. GO FOR IT! I would if I had thought of it first.

[noisecancellor]

Hi guys,

it i svery good to hear that people are interested in cancelling the dental drill noise. So firstly I would like to say I am doing a PhD on this problem. So my aim is to solve this problem. I want to say do not worry. Hopefully in some years you will not hear the noise anymore. The only problem is still we do not have a funding for this project. So if there are people with money and are interested to exploiting this area do not hasitate to contact me.

Regards

NoiseCancellor

[Engi-nerd]

You probably already know this by now because the original post was a year ago but they do have silent dentist drills now. I have actually had them used one me and they are fantastic. They are air drills so there is not even the painful sound of the drill grinding on the tooth.