Robots Are Real—and They're Here Now: A Clinician's Perspective on Emerging Robotics in Orthodontics

For more than a decade, I have been convinced that robotics would find a meaningful place in health care. Long before the technology was ready, I was asking colleagues in the tech industry to help me identify a robot suited for an orthodontic office. The responses were underwhelming, so I started searching on my own.

Pepper Comes to the Office

My search eventually led me to Pepper, a humanoid robot developed by the French company Aldebaran Robotics, in partnership with SoftBank Group of Japan. Introduced in June 2014, Pepper was the first consumer-grade humanoid robot brought to market. It had limited mobility and was never designed to perform clinical tasks, but it was charming, interactive, and utterly captivating to everyone who encountered it.

We brought Pepper into our practice, and the response was immediate (Fig. 1). Patients loved it. Parents filmed it. Colleagues talked about it. Whatever its functional limitations, Pepper demonstrated something important: people respond warmly and enthusiastically to robots in a health-care setting. That reaction planted a seed.

Inspired by what we witnessed, Todd Blank­enbecler, Chester Wang, and I founded Zeeno Robotics^* with the goal of developing and supporting robotics specifically designed for dental and orthodontic practices.

The Case for Robotics in Orthodontics

Conversations about robotics in health care tend to focus on a predictable set of applications: precision surgical assistance, space disinfection, patient transport, patient education and monitoring, medication delivery, and companionship for isolated or elderly patients. All of these are legitimate and evolving areas of development.

On the clinical frontier, robots are already making inroads. The Yomi Dental Implant Robot^** is cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to provide robotic guidance for implant placement. In a preprint posted in June 2025, associates from Perceptive Technologies and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine reported the first documented in-human, semi-automated robotic crown preparation, with the procedure completed in 15 minutes to a precision better than 50μm (this work is early-stage and not yet peer-­reviewed).¹ Although the role of robots in direct patient treatment remains limited for now, we can expect more treatment-focused robots to become available. The more immediate and practical opportunity lies in practice operations.

It is worth reflecting on how technology adoption tends to work in health care. What begins as innovation quickly becomes expectation. Digital radiography, digital imaging, cone-beam computed tomography, digital scanning—each of these was once a novelty, then a differentiator, and eventually a standard of care. Robotics is following the same trajectory. The practices that engage early will establish a meaningful advantage; by the time adoption feels safe and obvious, the window for differentiation will have closed.

From Curiosity to Purpose-Built Solutions

After several years of working with commercially available platforms, we recognized that what the orthodontic profession needed was not a general-­purpose robot adapted for dental use, but a system built specifically for this environment. That realization drove our software development—three full iterations across multiple robotic platforms—ultimately resulting in the Zeeno robot, which was designed and programmed specifically for orthodontic, pediatric, and general dental practices and has similar applicability across other health-care settings (Fig. 2).

While general-purpose robots are widely available, they lack the specialized software necessary for a dental environment. By organizing these technologies according to their functional roles, practices can integrate them more effectively and thus return high-value time to clinical staff (Table 1). A purpose-built system allows for integration with existing management tools (like Dolphin Management^†), transforming a “cool gadget” into a measurable operational asset.

Practice Robots

A practice robot is an autonomous clinical assistant that integrates with the practice management system and automates patient flow, escorting patients from reception to the operatory based on the daily schedule (Fig. 3). It can support chairside efficiency by delivering instruments and playing instructional media, allowing staff to remain focused on their patients. The Zeeno robot currently integrates only with Dolphin Management, but additional integrations are in development.

Delivery Robots

Typically deployed in high-volume practices and labs (and you may have seen them in restaurants), this autonomous delivery system manages the transport of instrument trays and supplies between clinical zones and sterilization, eliminating repetitive manual walking across large office footprints. An example is the Zeeno Carry^* (Fig. 4).

Companion Robots

This category of robots is designed to interact with patients and parents. They have advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and speech built in and are typically made in a humanoid form. In the case of orthodontic practices, they focus on patient engagement and education through proactive, interactive conversations. Zeeno’s entry in this category is the Mirokaï,^*** developed by Enchanted Tools, which uses advanced navigation and “AI ears” to guide patients and support a technology-­forward practice environment (Fig. 5). It is currently in development for 2027.

Sterilization Automator

Zeeno Sterile* is a workflow automation system in a unique robotics category pioneered by Zeeno (Fig. 6). It integrates with standard sterilization devices to automate the entire sterilization workflow—including ultrasonic cleaning, lubricating, rinsing, drying, wrapping, and autoclaving—while standardizing repetitive steps, minimizing human error, and reducing the risk of cross-contamination.

The AI Behind the Robots: Stella

All Zeeno robots are powered by an AI assistant called Stella. Stella is built on current large-language-model technology, including ChatGPT^‡ and Gemini.^†† She can converse naturally with patients about orthodontic treatment, explain the differences between aligners and traditional braces, answer questions about what to expect during treatment, and even tell a joke. Stella is configured with built-in guardrails that prevent responses to inappropriate topics; practices can further customize her behavior through a dedicated setup screen to specify, for example, that she answers only dental-related questions, tells only dental-themed jokes, or limits responses to two sentences.

What Is the Return on Investment?

This is invariably the first practical question, and it deserves a direct and concise answer. Consider the example of the robotic patient escort function. The robot serves as an autonomous clinical escort, navigating the office floor to lead patients from the waiting area directly to their assigned treatment chairs. This eliminates the constant “walking” tasks that pull assistants away from clinical duties and allows the team to stay focused on high-value chairside care while modernizing the patient’s entry into the clinical space.

In our practice, a robot escort takes roughly 2.25 minutes: about one minute to travel to the reception area, 15 seconds to announce the patient, and another minute to walk the patient to the treatment area. During that time, the clinical assistant remains at the chair, preparing for the appointment rather than navigating a crowded waiting room and possibly being interrupted. If an office completes 60 escorts in a day, that represents about two hours and 15 minutes of time returned to direct patient care. In practice, we find the observed gains can vary widely depending on workflow design, typically ranging from 1.5 to five hours per day in high-volume settings. Of course, if a patient is anxious and needs a human touch during the escort, the advantage evaporates.

Using the upper-end estimate of five hours saved per day, and applying a typical practice schedule and national wage data, yields a reclaimed labor value of more than $27,000 per year (see accompanying box), or an annual reclaimed clinical capacity of 1,200 staff hours. The practice can refocus those recovered hours into billable patient care, such as chairside setup and active treatment support.

As robotics continues to evolve, its capabilities will expand, and integration will become more seamless. As management consultant Peter Drucker once noted, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” The incorporation of robotics into orthodontic practice may represent one such transition point.

Robots are no longer experimental; they are functional tools capable of contributing to the orthodontic environment today. In other words, robots are real—and they’re here now.