An emergency department physician at Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital helped create two anatomically correct heart and lung emojis for smartphones, according to local radio station WBZ NewsRadio.
The emojis will be released later this year. Shuhan He, MD, teamed up with Jennifer Lee, the co-founder of Emojination, to design the realistic organs.
Dr. He hopes that integrating these emojis into hospital workflows, and also with patients, will close the gap in languages. Dr. He sees major opportunity with the use of emojis and other digital communication tools in the medical landscape.
"We deal with a lot of patients in the emergency department that may not speak English," Dr. He told WBZ NewsRadio. "It's important for us to communicate in the language that patients have. I think a lot of what healthcare is going to is having digital health records and digital communication with patients."