Abstract: A dental charting system having a control device configured to be held by a user or which is mounted to another device held by a user and the control device including one or more movement sensors for sensing movement of the control device in space and generating representative movement signals. A gesture processing module is provided to receive and process the movement signals to detect the occurrence of a gesture event from a set of predetermined gesture events, and which generates representative gesture control signals. A dental charting application program is also provided and runs on a host device and which provides a graphic user interface on a display associated with the host device for interacting with the application program, the application program being configured to receive and process the gesture control signals to enable interaction with the graphic user interface by the user via hand gesture movements of the control device.