Smart Bracket using Stress Sensor Chip
In this recent time, there are many people that wish to have nice teeth, white and in correct formation. But some people have teeth that are not in proper position. Therefore, they use bracket or dental brace that can be attached by a dentist. This is not an easy task for the dentist to attach the bracket to the teeth. This difficulty of attachment process results high percentage failure of the bracket attachment that can break some teeth.
Smartbracket/brace is designed to solve this problem. The solution is inserting stress sensor between each tooth and the brace. The sensors are small enough to fit to the brace and teeth. Using real-time measurement, the dentist can control the stress at the teeth during smartbracket attachment. Using this method, the failure of bracket attachment can be minimized.
This project was performed by researchers at IMTEK and I took a part in electronic device and software development. I have developed 32 channels input device using I2C and USB bus protocol for data communication with stress sensor chips attached at the bracket and the teeth. For Graphical User Interface I have also developed software for sensors data acquisition. The software is developed using MFC Visual C++ with multithreading acquisition capabilities. The working flow of measurement process can be seen in the following figure:
Working flow measurement (click to enlage).
From the software interface that I have developed, the user can control and request the hardware to acquire the data from up to 32 sensors connected to the electronic device. My electronic device will translate the user request signal from the software to perform data acquisition protocol to get the data from the sensors. The acquired data can be displayed on the computer screen. The following figures are photographs of the acquisition hardware.
The electronic device that is used for data communication with 32 sensor.