Our Story
In 2019, Shuhan He, MD and Jenny 8 Lee teamed up with members of Emojination to submit the anatomical heart and lungs emoji to the Unicode Consortium.
Their effort was motivated by a simple observation: with over 3,600 emoji in the Unicode standard, almost none represented the human body, medical conditions, or healthcare tools that billions of people interact with every day.
The anatomical heart and lungs were officially accepted into Unicode 14.0 in 2021, appearing on billions of devices worldwide. This success, documented in a JAMA article, proved that the medical community could successfully advocate for better emoji representation.
Now, the Medical Emoji team has grown and is working to propose additional medical emoji — from organs like the kidney and liver to tools like the EKG and blood bag — to ensure medicine is fully represented in our digital communication.