Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital (@Sunnybrook) live tweeted an open-heart surgery Feb. 20 to raise awareness about February’s Heart Month and heart disease.
Sunnybrook’s tweets all contained the hashtag #SbHeart and spanned the entire duration of the surgery.
“You might expect the OR to be very quiet, but not so: Dr. Cohen’s team likes to listen to the radio to relax and concentrate,” read one of the many tweets.
Tweets like this gave people a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the operating room.
The patient was a 57-year-old named Lou who has coronary artery disease. This heart disease comes from a build-up of plaque on the artery walls which leads to the slowing of blood flow. Complications of this disease can lead to angina (chest pain) or even a heart attack.
The open-heart surgery, also known as a coronary artery bypass graft, was performed by Dr. Gideon Cohen and a team of experts from Sunnybrook’s Schulich Heart Centre.
With social media being the optimal way to reach the masses these days, there have been some interesting uses of it in recent years.
Some awesome ways people are using Twitter
From Space
In a 2013 space mission, Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space, posted pictures of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. He posted these photos to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr which gained a huge following – -his Twitter currently has over one million followers.
To communicate with a house
In 2009 IBM engineer Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark, created a buzz with his “twittering house.” Standford-Clark designed a sensor technology and it hooked up his house so that whenever something happened he got a notification to his phone via Twitter.
He received a tweet telling him his water use had increased and it recommended to check for leaks.
For sharks to tweet their own warnings
In late 2013 scientists in Australia caught over 300 sharks and tagged them with transmitters designed to send a tweet when one of them came within one kilometre of a West Australian beach. The tweets were sent through Surf Life Saving Western Australia‘s Twitter account, where people could regularly check for updates and decide whether the water was safe or not.
For babies to tweet from the womb
In 2008 Corey Menschen created a product called Kickbee which is a band that goes across a pregnant woman’s stomach. It contains sensors that are triggered when it senses movement from the fetus. Any movement is sent to Twitter with the message, “I just kicked Mommy!”
