Emoji For the Medical Community

Visual Scale

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Our Story

In 2019, Shuhan He, MD and Jenny 8 Lee teamed up with members of Emojination to submit the anatomical heart and lung emoji.

Anatomical Heart 🫀 and Anatomical Lung 🫁 were approved as part of Unicode 13.0 in 2020 and added to Emoji 13.0 in 2020.

In September 2021, Dr. He published a piece in JAMA entitled Emoji for the Medical Community describing how Emoji could further digital health in medicine.

Since then, a team of physicians, medical societies, and patient advocacy organizations have come together to advocate for a more comprehensive set of medical Emoji, believing that there could be significant benefits for patients.

A Brief Timeline

2018

Anatomical Brain Created the Category

2019

Anatomical Heart and Anatomical Lung Accepted into Unicode 13.0

2021

JAMA Article Released

2021-current

The national Medical Emoji campaign

Why Medical Emoji?

Medical emoji has many uses in transmission and communication. A stomach can signify hunger for food, abdominal pain, cramping, and be a way for people to be aware of their health. A more comprehensive set of medical Emoji can help unify and create representation for these critical organs.

A universal visual language

We are a group of physicians and patient advocates who believe that the organs that all humans have should be represented on the Emoji keyboard.

As physicians, we’ll be able to say, it’s ok to have a liver. When a child needs a kidney transplant or develops ulcerative colitis, that its normal to talk about this organ, and that its not the most embarrassing or scary thing to have.

Ultimately, this is an opportunity to promote, tolerance, inclusion and education about medical organs in a modern, accessible, and international way.

Before Emoji

Visual Analogue Scales have been critical tools for physicians to understand patient pain and symptoms. These scales, however, are analogue, so cannot be integrated into digital health applications

With Emoji

Emoji provide the opportunity to use digitally native scales that are free, open source, and available to integrate into any digital health application, allow collection of patient reported outcomes data.