An overview of global dentistry development trends reveals that digitization has become a new solution for clinical care and can be employed in integrative medicine. The dentists' experiences using dental devices in clinical settings allow development of dental implants, surgical devices, dental prosthetics/alveolar bone defect repair software, and 3D intraoral scanning systems to enhance the value added for dental device products. The trend of ageing population will create massive market demand for orthopedic devices. As a result, many medical manufacturers are investing in integrative imaging, positional navigation and robotic arms. This investment is greatly enhancing the precision and safety of surgeries, in order to improve the overall quality of medical care.

Under guidance and support of Department of Industrial Technology, MOEA, the Metal Industries Research & Development Centre (MIRDC) has implemented “The Developments of Navigation System for Digital Stomatological and Spinal Minimally Invasive Surgery and Medical Imaging System of Bio-Pathology Diagnosis” program. MIRDC demonstrated many medical R&D results at the 2018 Taiwan Healthcare+ Expo from November 29 to December 2. The R&D results are focused on precision oral prosthetics, next-generation dental implants, rapid intraoral scanning, 3D spinal imaging for surgical navigation, pathology scanning and screening and biomedical imaging. A wide variety of surgical categories, from internal to external, were on display. It is hoped that these will finally provide clinicians with completely new, safer, more convenient, smart surgical operation devices.

Dr. Chih-lung Lin, vice president of MIRDC said that key digital dental technologies are already taking shape through support and guidance from the government. Major domestic medical device manufacturers such as Qisda are at the same time cooperating to promote commercialized development. In the future, they will combine even more excellent domestic dental products and manufacturers to form a integrated service & digital dentistry system to enter overseas markets. Guided by the New Southbound Policy, Taiwan's medical products will be assisted to enter Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia. This will open a major new market for development in dental devices.