It was shared by Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a London-based doctor that used Snap Inc.'s Spectacles to document a first person view of a hernia repair surgery.
For Dr. Ahmed, the surgery was like his routine operations. But at the London Independent Hospital on December 9th, he took the black version of Spectacles to record his incision to his patient's abdomen. Throughout the surgery, he shared his unique point-of-view, providing in-depth look at the procedure as well as insights to what he was doing at any given moment.
Because Spectacles only allow 10-second clips, one of his assistants regularly pressed the record button and uploaded video clips to the doctor's account.
Dr. Ahmed said that he livestreamed the surgery so his medical students could watch it as a tutorial. During the surgery, about 150 to 200 medical students tuned in to his Snapchat Story.
"I've always thought about the way we teach," said Dr. Ahmed. "How do you use these wearables in the clinical workspace for practice and also education purposes?"
Just like any other Snapchat Stories, the recording was archived for 24 hours. Dr. Ahmed put together the many 10-seconds video clips into a single one hour video which was then uploaded to YouTube.
"The Snapchat platform is really interesting because it mimics who we are," he said. "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 of it, 95% of it, is all short-term."
The livestreamed surgery was indeed the first, but for Dr. Ahmed, this wasn't the first time he took non-medical technology into his work. As both a surgeon and and a co-founder of VR and AR firm Medical Realities, in April, he had a 360-degree camera to document a removal surgery of a tumor from a patient's colon. The video was at the time the first virtual reality medical film to ever recorded.
"As individuals, as a surgeon in my case, we have a certain knowledge base that we want to share with as many people around as possible," he said.
