Iit-k Students Develop Low Cost Dental Chair | Kanpur News - Times of India

Kanpur: Three students of design program (name of a department) of IIT-Kanpur along with a team of students from PUJ (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana) university based in Colombia in the US, under the guidance of IIT-K faculty members have remained successful in developing a low cost dental chair worth Rs 20,000 only (this does not include the price of the dental tools used by the dentists). This is the cheapest dental chair in the Indian market as the traditional chairs range anywhere between Rs one lakh to five lakhs. The affordable dental chair developed under the ME310 (name of a course) program run at Stanford University has been named as 'FLux". The prototype of the chair has been installed at Sardar Patel postgraduate institute of medical and dental sciences in Lucknow where it is being used successfully since September 2015. This has raised hope that the mass production of this dental chair could be done in near future which would further bring down the cost. The development of this dental chair has received applause from project director, Standford university, Larry Lifer. The most unique feature of this dental chair being that it is very patient friendly. Talking to TOI, Amit Kundal, PHd scholar at IIT-Kanpur who has worked on developing the chair said, "It was after carrying out thorough study of the present day dental chairs and the needs of the patients that we started working on the design of our chair. While we omitted out those features which were not required, we added a few features which could have made our designed chair a comfortable experience for the patients. The dental tools which otherwise a patient is able to see on a traditional dental chair is not visible in our model. The tools visible to the patients unnecessarily create panic in his mind knowing the fact that he has to undergo a dental surgery." He while talking about a new feature of this chair said that spittoon has been made modular in low cost chair instead of it being manual. Kundal said that in this mega project two universities including IIT-Kanpur and PUJ Colombia were the academic partners, Sardar Patel PG institute of Medical and Dental Sciences in Lucknow was the industry partner. The project was supported by Stanford university. Prof Shantanu Bhattacharya under whose guidance the dental chair was developed said a patent for the low cost dental chair has been filed by us. He said that the students took guidance and consultation for their project from other faculty members on the institute campus. This included valuable comments from Prof Satyki Ray of Design program department. Mohit Tewari, another student involved in the project informed that the low cost dental chair will come in the budget of the dentists who otherwise find it difficult to set up a dental clinic as the tools specially the chair comes very costly. He said that the cost of the chair starts from Rs one lakh but this one is only for Rs 20,000. Therefore, any student clearing Bachelor of Dental Surgery course will be able to set up his clinic easily now. "In India every second person has dental hygiene problem. There is only 1 dentist for 2.5 lakh people in Indian rural market. In urban area for every 10,000 patients, there is only dentist. Consumption of tobacco and Cigarette are the major causes of such situation. The cost of setting up dental facility is very high and that is the reason why there is such a gap in terms of dentist per person in India. Thus we took up this challenge of designing a affordable dental chair for masses in India", said Tewari. We have been given this opportunity to address this issue in collaboration with Sardar Patel institute of post graduate studies in Dental and Medical Sciences, Lucknow. As a part of the global alliance we have collaborated with Colombia. Four students from the university visited IIT Kanpur to understand the real context and do the user study in India.