Snapchat surgery: Education by seeing what a surgeon sees

To fight global shortage of surgeons & teachers, live surgery broadcast to medical students around world by innovative medical school teacher.

EDUCATION & MEDICINE

Snapchat Spectacle Education: Seeing what a surgeon sees

Experimentation is necessary to how to best put new technologies to use in education.

Watching surgery through the eyes of a surgeon is one such innovation in medical education.

Snapchat's 'Virtual Surgeon' Dr Shafri Ahmed in the UK specialises in doing exactly this.

First, in 2014 he used Google Glass to broadcast surgery live to 14,000 people around the world.

Earlier this year, in April, Dr. Ahmed used a 360-degree panoramic camera to shoot a virtual reality film of surgery with 55,000 people watching it.

SURGERY RECORDED BY SNAPCHAT GLASSES 

This week Dr. Ahmed used Snapchat Spectacles to broadcast hernia surgery in real time to 150 medical students around the world, after which he answered questions about the surgery (watch surgery here).

Snapchat glasses film ten second video clips and then upload them to Snapchat via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. They cost about $130.

An assistant had to hit the record button on the glasses every 10 seconds to create video clips for the whole surgery. It took about half a minute for each clip to be uploaded and arrive online. Admittedly, continuous video streaming would seem preferable.

These glasses might well have application teaching people how to perform other detailed tasks using the hands (manual tasks) by providing video clips shot from the perspective of the person performing the task. Computer, mobile phone or watch repair come to mind as possible applications. 

WORLD SURGEON SHORTAGE

It should come as no surprise that there is a shortage of surgeons worldwide caused partly by a brain drain of surgeons to the US and other western countries (see here).

Surgical livecasts thus have potential for sharing important surgical technique to areas where there are severe surgeon shortages and shortages of surgical teaching resources also.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38314539

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2onEVTlvhww

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/snapchat-spectacles-surgeon-streams-surgery_uk_58527b42e4b0986a15628192

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4037406/UK-surgeon-streams-gruesome-operation-using-Snapchat-glasses-posts-footage-YouTube.html

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/vanderbiltmagazine/surgeon-shortage-has-global-implications/

http://www.irinnews.org/report/89186/africa-ten-countries-desperately-seeking-doctors

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24218153

สามารถฝึกอ่านออกเสียงและดูคำแปลได้ที่ : http://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/1161276/snapchat-surgery-education-by-seeing-what-a-surgeon-sees