Automated Formative Feedback in a Virtual Reality (VR) Dental Surgery Simulator

Fine motor skill is indispensable for a dentist. As in many other medical fields of study, the traditional surgical master apprentice model is widely adopted in dental education. Recently, virtual reality (VR) simulators have been employed as supplementary components to the traditional skill-training curriculum, and numerous dental VR systems have been developed academically and commercially. However, the full promise of such systems has yet to be realized due to the lack of sufficient support for formative feedback. Without such a mechanism, evaluation still demands dedicated time of experts in scarce supply. With the aim to fill the gap of formative assessment using VR simulators in skill training in dentistry, we propose a framework to objectively assess the surgical skill and generate feedback automatically. The core concept of the framework is to generate the feedback by correlating the portion of the procedure responsible with the error in the outcome. Assessment of outcome and the procedure, pedagogical models, and multiple modalities to provide feedback are the integral components of this research.