Highlights in Contemporary Smart Dental Materials: a Review

Purpose of Review: This review focuses on highlights in the literature about contemporary smart dental materials. The concept, classification, requirements, and examples of recently introduced smart dental materials are summarized and described. Recent Findings: Various recently introduced smart dental materials are described, such as smart resin composites, glass ionomer, pit and fissure sealants, conservative and endodontic instruments, orthodontic wires, silicone elastomer bite registration material, and thermochromic toothbrushes. These materials are highly intelligent and responsive to their surrounding environment. They would potentially provide groundbreaking dental services with enhanced clinical outcomes from the treatment procedures. Summary: Smart materials can respond to stimuli and environmental changes by activating their functions accordingly. Recently introduced smart dental materials have properties that could be altered in a controlled fashion by stimuli such as stress, temperature, moisture, pH, and electric or magnetic fields. There is a robust trend in dental material science for the development and application of these intelligent, smart dental materials. These materials could allow new and revolutionary dental therapeutic treatments with a significant improvement in the clinical outcome of the treatments. A limitation of the current study is mainly due to a lack of long-term studies about the durability of these materials. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.