Immersive Haptic Simulation for Psychomotor Skill Acquisition in Preclinical Prosthetic Dentistry: A Randomized Study

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of using the VirTeaSy Dental simulator in conjunction with a virtual reality headset on student performance in conventional fixed prosthodontics simulations.

The study involved 85 novice dental students from the Dental Faculty of XX University, who were randomly assigned to two groups. In phase one, the control group (G1, n=42) completed conventional simulation exercises according to a standardized protocol, while the test group (G2, n=43) performed a combination of immersive haptic simulation followed by conventional simulation exercises. In phase two, the groups were subdivided: G1a and G2a performed the conventional simulation only, while G1b and G2b engaged in both immersive haptic and conventional simulation. This design assessed the effects of continued, delayed, discontinued, or no exposure to immersive haptic simulation. Student performance was evaluated using single-unit prosthetic preparations after each phase using the software prepCheck 3.0. A Bonferroni adjustment was used to control the overall alpha level. A significance threshold of p < 0.025 (5%/2) was used for comparison of the results from phase 1, and p < 0.008 (5%/6) was used for comparisons for phase 2.

The results from phase one showed a slightly higher mean score for prosthetic preparation quality in G2 (17.19 ± 1.53) than G1 (16.55 ± 1.80), although the difference was not statistically significant (p > 0.05). In phase two, the four subgroup scores were comparable with no significant differences (G1a: 21.90 ± 3.20, G1b: 22.38 ± 2.33, G2a: 22.10 ± 2.40, G2b: 22.95 ± 2.93). In both phases, no statistically significant differences were observed between the groups.

Combining immersive haptic and conventional simulation in various modalities does not significantly improve student performance in prosthetic preparation compared to conventional simulation alone.