After beginning her research career, she held positions at Okayama University and the University of Tokyo, among others, before joining Keio University in 2011, where she continues today.
Her work is interdisciplinary research that fully fuses engineering and medicine — spanning signal processing, affective (KANSEI) engineering, biosignal analysis, endocrine biomarker development, and the analysis of circulating hormone dynamics. In particular, she independently developed a noise-rejection algorithm (patented) that analyses biosignals highly susceptible to disturbance, such as EEG and pulse waves, with high precision and in real time. Building on this core technology, she pursues a wide range of research, including the estimation of emotion, sleep stages, blood pressure, circulating hormone dynamics, and early signs of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — also patented.
She has further developed the world's first technology to acquire pulse waves non-contact from facial images and estimate the precursors of various diseases with high accuracy, obtaining related patents. Her research has been published in numerous academic journals in Japan and abroad, and she has created many original technologies and inventions, including the world's first real-time emotion-acquisition device.
To bring these research achievements into practical use in society and contribute to improving people's health and well-being, she founded IKI Japan Inc. in 2024, advancing R&D that bridges academia and industry.
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.