Dr. Shohan Ha, a senior physician working at a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, argues that the world needs more medical emojis, with an emphasis on as realistic illustrations as possible, which will facilitate online communication between physicians and patients. Unable to speak or type sentences to describe his condition to the doctor on the other side of the chat, the patient chooses to illustrate his condition with emojis. feels.
"Fast and efficient communication is key in emergencies," the doctor explained in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Communication channels should be developed in which quick tapping on icons and emojis will assist in medical decisions," he added.
Last year, Ha and his team proposed adding some emojis to the Unicode standard - an international standard that represents text in computer systems and is responsible, among other things, for the uniformity of emojis you see in your chat apps by default.
Although some emojis, including a blood drop, stethoscope and plaster, have already been approved by the standard, it turns out that 15 of the medical emojis offered, such as illustrations of liver, lungs, crutches, pack of pills, infusion bag and more, have not yet been received.
The emojis not approved by the Unicode consortium, screenshot
Beyond that, out of the 3,521 emojis currently included in the Unicode standard, only 30 of them are directly related to medicine (with all due respect to the elephant ...), which is simply too little in Ha's opinion. "The medical community must reach a consensus on which iconography will best serve the profession and patients, in order to improve the quality of health services and access to medical information in the digital age," said the doctor, who does not intend to give up - not even cartoon emojis - until he achieves Its purpose. "If we can not communicate, we can not be good doctors," he concluded.
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