Yasue Mitsukura began her research career in 1999 at the University of Tokushima, then held positions at Okayama University and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology before joining Keio University's Faculty of Science and Technology in 2011, where she was promoted to Professor in 2018. She currently serves as Professor in the Department of System Design Engineering and holds a concurrent appointment in the School of Medicine, Department of Neuropsychiatry.
Her field is biosignal processing and affective engineering. To make EEG and pulse waves — both notoriously fragile under real-world noise — usable at the point of measurement rather than only in the lab, she has built her research program around a real-time noise-rejection algorithm, first patented in 1997. On top of that foundation, she develops methods to estimate a range of physiological and psychological states from raw biosignals, including affect (KANSEI), sleep staging, blood-pressure trends, circulating hormone dynamics, and early signs of dementia.
Her work has been published in Nature and other peer-reviewed journals, and her affect-estimation invention was selected for the World Top-50 Inventions. In 2024 she founded IKI Japan Inc. as the vehicle to bring this research into society.
Why I founded IKI
The body is always speaking to us — through brain waves, pulse, the smallest shifts in expression, the trembling of the voice, the rhythm of hormones. But its voice is so quiet that it is almost always drowned out by the noise of the world.
For more than two decades I have worked, as a researcher, on a single question: how to recover that quiet voice with precision, not in a lab, but at the point of measurement. The hardest wall in biosignal work has always been noise. Sensor placement, room lighting, the state of the skin, breathing, even the small ripples of emotion — everything finds its way into the signal. The real-time noise-rejection algorithm, first crystallised in a 1997 patent, was the first rung of the ladder over that wall. On top of it I have built methods to read affect, sleep, circulation, hormones, speech and the earliest signs of dementia — one layer at a time.
The results have travelled the world as academic papers. But the translation of that science into healthcare practice, into industry, into everyday life, has been slower than it should be. Between a paper and an implementation lies a surprisingly deep valley.
IKI was founded to cross that valley. We want to build a sturdy bridge between research and society — honouring the disciplines of data, the integrity owed to research participants, and the caution required in medicine — so that people can listen, a little more clearly, to the signals their own bodies are sending. We are assembling the research, the products, and the ecosystem from two bases: Tokyo and overseas.
People can only pursue what they can measure. That is why I believe making happiness and sensibility measurable — things we have never been able to measure before — will reshape the very meaning of richness. There are signals inside the body that have yet to be read. We are building the means to turn them into something everyone can hold.