Virtual Reality Application for Relieving the Pain of Child Dental Patients

In this paper we develop an application that eases the anxiety of the child dentistry patients by taking them into a virtual environment. This virtual environment is a friendly and calming place, thus making it possible to minimize the pain and hard-ship caused by the dental procedures. The main aim of this study is to improve the user experience and usability elements of previous research with the use of a new technology (virtual reality). The main restriction of the application is the fact that the user has to stay still in the dental unit, since the child patient is not allowed to give a verbal input or use a controller during a treatment procedure. It can be dangerous for the child to move his/her head during treatment, therefore novel techniques are adapted to overcome these issues and create a user-friendly application. The movement restriction makes it possible to work with a three degrees of freedom VR headset, which is the most affordable type and can be easily purchased by dentists. One crucial part of this study is the animation in the beginning of the application intended to calm down the children as much as possible. Friendly characters with realistic and appropriate movements will be created and 3D modeled. A fun and playful scenario with an educational dialog is designed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown so that in future practical virtual experience applications will be adopted by many dentists to make their jobs easier with the patients.