King’s College Dental Institute’s Professor Brian Millar thinks that his invention – a noise cancellation device that eliminates the unnerving sound of dental drills – will make people not fear the dentist. Really, Professor Brian Millar? Really?
Many people put off going to the dentist because of anxiety associated with the noise of the dentist’s drill. But this device has the potential to make fear of the drill a thing of the past.
The beauty of this gadget is that it would be fairly cost-effective for dentists to buy, and any patient with an MP3 player would be able to benefit from it, at no extra cost.
Millar lead a team from King’s College London, Brunel University and the London South Bank University to develop the noise cancellation device, which works like noise cancellation headphones: It creates an inverted sound wave to cancel the noise, focusing on the frequencies generated by the drills.
What makes me fear the dentist is not only the drilling noise, however, but the pain, the taste of the anaesthesia and the blood coming out of my mouth. Once we get rid of all that, my fear will go away. But in the meantime, getting rid of that damn noise will make me and many other people very happy. [Daily Mail]