At the London Independent Hospital on December 9, 2016, Dr. Shafi Ahmed walked into the operating room wearing scrubs and Snapchat’s Spectacles om his nose.
Spectacles are the social media app’s latest development. This pair of sunglasses has been fitted with a camera that films in 10-second clips and shares the material directly to Snapchat.
As Dr. Ahmed performed a hernia repair surgery, he selectively filmed clips of the procedure to share to his account, forming “a tutorial” for his medical students.
While some are amazed at Dr. Ahmed’s ingenuity, he brushed this off and said, “I’ve always thought about the way we teach. How do you use these wearables in the clinical workspace for practice and also education purposes?”
Earlier this year, he already used a 360-degree camera to film a tumor removal and plans on continuing to use new technology in this beneficial way. “It’s not about one-to-one or one-to-two for me. It’s about one-to-many,” he explained. “That’s my drive.”
The doctor even admitted that he quite enjoyed the challenge of filming the best 10-second segments to share online, “It’s like you’re presenting a recipe. You’re training people in a structured way.”
At the time of the actual procedure, anywhere between 150 and 200 medical students followed Dr. Ahmed’s Snapchat to watch the surgery take place. In the 24 hours following, even more students discovered the footage and watched it then.
Dr. Ahmed is pleased with his success and the “good” response he received from his viewers. “They liked the way it was structured. They thought the segments work quite well,” he said. He also noted that Snapchat’s short filming segments forced him to remove “all the boring bits of the operation that may not have educational value for students.”
In the future, Dr. Ahmed hopes to film and share more of his surgical procedures. His goal? To reach as many people as he can around the world.
You can watch his original footage here. Be warned, some of it may be medically graphic.
