Intelligent Dental Handpiece: Real-Time Motion Analysis for Skill Development

Modern dental education increasingly calls for smarter tools that combine precision with meaningful feedback. In response, this study presents the Intelligent Dental Handpiece (IDH), a next-generation training tool designed to support dental students and professionals by providing real-time insights into their techniques. The IDH integrates motion sensors and a lightweight machine learning system to monitor and classify hand movements during practice sessions. The system classifies three motion states: Alert (10°–15° deviation), Lever Range (0°–10°), and Stop Range (>15°), based on IMU-derived features. A dataset collected from 61 practitioners was used to train and evaluate three machine learning models: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (Linear RBF, Polynomial kernels), and a Neural Network. Performance across models ranged from 98.52% to 100% accuracy, with Random Forest and Logistic Regression achieving perfect classification and AUC scores of 1.00. Motion features such as Deviation, Take Time, and Device type were most influential in predicting skill levels. The IDH offers a practical and scalable solution for improving dexterity, safety, and confidence in dental training environments.