Today is World Emoji Day!
July 17th marks the annual unofficial holiday celebrating the first use of emoji. Emoji are little pictures and icons used in texts, tweets, social media reactions, and more!
Emoji have evolved over the last decade to reflect diversity, places, food, animals, celebrities, and a variety of different emotions.
There are even books written entirely in emoji!
This year, we want to highlight and celebrate the use of emoji in healthcare.
The DHSS Library hosts the only Graphic Medicine collection in the state of Delaware, made up entirely of graphic novels and memoirs focusing on health and social issues. The concept of graphic medicine is the use of pictures and visuals to convey heavy topics, making it easier for patients to process and for healthcare professionals to empathize with their patients. The use of visuals also benefits individuals who are more visual learners, who are dyslexic, non-English speakers, and younger readers. The use of emoji in healthcare provides the same bridge towards effective communication.
Effective communication is essential for successful treatment and care, but there are certain health situations that can limit the ability for speech. Victims of stroke or traumatic brain injury may have difficulty communicating verbally or through written text. For example, the ability to send a "thumbs up" symbol can be used as an alternative to saying "OK" (He, 2023). Many individuals who have taken a trip to the ER recognizes the pain scale with a series of different faces to assist in measuring pain level upon entry. Simply point to the face emoji that looks like what you feel and already you are communicating effectively for your health!
The use of emoji helps prevent confusion or concerns of professionalism when it comes to communicating with patients. Emoji can be considered its own language as complex as any other, but pictures are often very clear when it comes to make a specific point. An angry face clearly means anger. A heart clearly means love. Like any other tool, they can be used inappropriately or abused, but according to linguistic anthropologist Colin Halverson: "it doesn't seem that emoji are any more prone to that than words" (Griffiths, 2023).
Dr. Shuhan He from Massachusetts General Hospital says it best when "emoji help communicate in a way that is less confusing for everyone. The big takeaway [is] that this is a language, and it should be treated serious like any other language. We take Chinese and Spanish, and all other languages, seriously. We should interpret emoji just like we understand those other languages." Dr. He has developed anatomically accurate heart and lungs and advocated for them to be approved by the Unicode Consortium to make them accessible to the public. These emoji and hopefully more like them will make nonverbal communication in a healthcare setting more applicable and accessible (Hennessey, 2023).
0 Comments.