Saturday, September 21, 2013

Shadow Puppet: An App That Lets iPhone Pictures Tell a Story

They say a picture is worth that thousand words, but nowhere is this more true than with a new, free, iPhone app called Shadow Puppet that lets you turn selected photographs on your iPhone into a narrated video storyline.

I saw this app reviewed over at Techcrunch and immediately saw its potential as a teaching aid.  The app allows you to pick a series of iPhone photos from your camera roll, order them, and then record a narrative about your pictures.  What is unique is that you can zoom or move between photos as you tell your story, annotating them by touching areas on the photo that you are discussing as it records the video.  (Very cool).

Here's my very first video I made with the app describing the new Zio XT patch monitor that records 14-days of a patient's heart rhythm that we've been using in our clinic.  Simply made, these video clips are easily shared via email, Facebook or Twitter.  For this particular video, I still had to edit portions of the patient's report on Photoshop, then sent the images to my iPhone but, still, that was easily done.

Want to teach a fellow how to implant a pacemaker?  Take some photos and show them!  Have an EKG that has a finding that you're not sure about?  Snap a picture (without patient identifying information, of course) , annotate it with your question and send it to your EP!  Simple, elegant, and who knows, maybe even life-saving.

-Wes

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for sharing this - great potential in many fields!

jnazarimd said...

Zio and shadow puppet checks SHOULD be coming soon (don't hold your breath, they'll never come). Great demo. Within 10 seconds of seeing it I downloaded shadow, obviously a great teaching tool