Snapchat launched Spectacles – sunglasses that come with cameras to allow users to take pictures and recordings, a few months back. Little did they know, the Spectacles would be used as a tool of education. Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a Britain-based hernia repair surgeon made use of Snapchat’s Spectacles while making an incision in his patient’s abdomen. He then made use of his Snapchat account to share his own point of view while operating his patient.
“I’ve always thought about the way we teach,” Dr. Ahmed told TIME. “How do you use these wearables in the clinical workspace for practise and also education purposes? It’s not about one-to-one or one-to-two for me. It’s about one-to-many. That’s my drive,” he added.
He went on to explain why he enjoys Snapchat so much. “The Snapchat platform is really interesting because it mimics who we are. It thinks on a 24-hour, short-term basis, and we, as individuals, work in short-term basis. We see things, we forget about them. Some goes into our long-term memory but most it – 95 per cent of it, is all short-term,” he said.
There were about 200 medical students that watched the tutorial from his perspective. The response was really good, according to him. “They liked the way it was structured. They thought the segments work quite well,” he said. In the coming weeks, Ahmed will be publishing the results of his Snapchat experiment.
