Orthodontic Tester

Description

This project was a Dean’s Research Project at the Univeristy of Alberta under the direction of Dr. Hisham Badawi and Dr. Jason Carey.

Dr. Badawi was interested in quantifying the forces and moments applied to teeth by braces. A previous researcher had designed an elaborate test device that would allow the forces to be measured on a set of model teeth. Each model tooth was connected to a 6 degree of freedom load cell.

My tasks was to develop a method to visually display the mechanical load on a particular tooth based on the data from the load cell in real-time.

I developed a program in LabVIEW that would take the forces and moments measured by the load cell, transform them to the local tooth coordinate system, and then display the results in 3D.

• Date: 2005