JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Throughout the past several years, there has been an increasing need for medical and health-related emojis to become more present in our society. Even as the total number of emojis increases every year, the number of health-related emojis continues to be the same. This lack of innovation within the field presents a great opportunity for innovation in the field of medical communication. As the world becomes more interconnected through electronic communication, there is a lot of potential for medical professionals to develop new artistic representations of health and medical topics through emojis. Emoji are beginning to be used in more pieces of health communication, such as patient guides, procedure summaries, and general signage throughout hospitals to great amounts of success. However, the limiting factor using emojis is the finite number of health-related emojis. In order to address this problem, we propose a call to action to medical professionals to begin developing new emojis based on their health expertise. Anyone is able to submit an emoji to the Unicode Standard, which is the body that collects and standardizes emojis. By going through the submission process, we can expand the representations of health emojis and make certain topics more accessible for a greater number of people. This can present a great method of allowing a wider array of access to medical information that might be locked behind complex and technical words. In the future, we hope to continue pushing for a greater number of Unicode Standard emojis that depict healthcare by describing how health professionals can draw and submit emojis.