How ‘smart’ is smart dentistry?

Abstract

Background: Latest advances in information and health technologies enabled dentistry to follow the paradigm shift occurring in medicine – the transition to so called smart medicine. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to assess how ‘smart’ is smart dentistry as of the end of 2018. Methods: We analysed the state of the art in smart dentistry, performing bibliometric mapping on a corpus of smart dentistry papers found in the Scopus bibliographical database. Results: The search resulted in a corpus of 3451 papers, revealing that smart dentistry research is following the progress in smart medicine; however, there are some gaps in some specific areas like gamification and use of holistic smart dentistry systems. Conclusions: Smart dentistry is smart; however, it must become smarter.