IoT: Smart Control of a Dental Chair

Collaborating with HQSoftware, the customer got an end-to-end prototype that is capable of remotely controlling a dental chair and automating its support. The delivered prototype can be easily developed into a production-ready solution with no need to build its functionality from scratch. Moreover, the underlying technology stack — suggested by our team — helped the customer to decide on how to digitize its new product line of stomatological equipment.

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Customer

The customer is a large manufacturer of medical equipment, including stomatological chairs.

On pushing a new model of a dental chair into production, the company also wanted to enable remote control of the chair and migrate to new hardware. For that purpose, the customer collaborated with HQSoftware to deliver a prototype that would allow for evaluating hardware performance compatible with contemplated functionality.

With the prototype, a user should be capable of operating chair’s head board, turning on/off a dental drill (as well as set up its rotation rates), controlling light, and ensuring remote control via a smartphone / tablet / laptop.

Challenges

In the course of the project, the team at HQSoftware had to address the following challenges:

• A thorough research of technologies should be carried out to demonstrate the customer, which options fit its business needs. What is more, the technology stack underlying the prototype should ensure that the functionality can be easily extended and supported.
• As the legacy system featured a small touch screen inconvenient in usage, remote control should be enabled on a screen of any resolution. It was critical as the performance of a dental chair determines the quality of the doctor’s job and patient’s health.

Solution

With Angular, engineers at HQSoftware developed the client side of the prototype, while Node.js was utilized for the server side.

To ensure remote control on devices of any resolution, our team enabled event-driven data exchange via the WebSocket protocol. As a result, it is now possible to not only control a dental chair remotely, but also automate its support. Thus, if a doctor experiences some technical failure with the chair, s/he can share screens with an operator to let him/her check what is going wrong and provide necessary assistance.

The prototype also allowed for selecting different animation types and tuning their settings. With this feature, the customer could evaluate the solution’s efficiency on a real device under different workloads and choose hardware to meet the needs.

Furthermore, developers at HQSoftware introduced a possibility to read a QR code that grants access to control the chair via a smartphone / tablet / laptop.

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