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About

Mihoko Fukushima is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), with a focus on assistive robotics for elderly care and the nuanced coordination of verbal and non-verbal communication. Her most-cited work, "Coordination of verbal and non-verbal actions in human–robot interaction at museums and exhibitions" (55 citations), established foundational insights into how robots can seamlessly integrate speech, gaze, and body movement to engage with people in public spaces. Building on this, Fukushima has made significant contributions to reducing caregiver burden through robotic wheelchair systems. Her 2014 paper on multiple robotic wheelchairs that autonomously follow a companion (11 citations) addresses the critical challenge of enabling a small caregiving team to assist many elderly individuals simultaneously. She further refined this with a wheelchair capable of parallel movement alongside multiple companions (8 citations), based on ethnographic observations in care facilities. Her notable 2016 study, “I’ll Be There Next” (6 citations), revealed how human gaze patterns can be used to convey service order, offering a design principle for more intuitive robot assistance. Additionally, her cross-cultural quiz robot experiments (2013, 4 and 3 citations) uncovered universal and language-specific patterns in how people respond to robots, highlighting her interdisciplinary approach bridging robotics, linguistics, and ethnography.