Injury changed the course of Yoky Matsuoka’s life while she was still just a teenager, forcing her to change her life’s ambitions and set a new course. As a star athlete, nobody expected her to show much interest in science and mathematics, but Yoky surprised everybody by pivoting to electrical engineering, and devised prosthetics that offered far greater control and flexibility than anything that had come before. Having become one of the leading technologists in the field of medicine, this Secret Superhero is now pivoting again to help working mothers manage their workloads more effectively through technology. 

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As one door closes 

Yoky was born in 1972 in Japan, and growing up her one and only concern was tennis, something she later described as “the one thing in my life”. Yoky was focused on becoming a professional player, and by the time she reached her teenage years it was apparent that she had the talent to realize that ambition. At the age of fifteen her parents took the difficult decision to support their daughter’s career by moving to California, but disaster struck just as Yoky was beginning to make inroads as a young professional. She had risen to 21st in Japan’s rankings, and seemed certain to progress much further, but a succession of ankle injuries led to her being told by doctors that her athletic career was effectively over.

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Yoky was devastated, but also now faced a new challenge. Her focus had solely been on tennis, but that door was now closed and she had to decide what to do with the remainder of her life. She decided that she wanted to build a robot that could play tennis, and after reading up on robotics she realized this was not an impossible dream, and devoted her focus to this new tennis-related project. That dream sustained her all the way through her undergrad studies at Berkeley, and on to MIT where she joined the team of renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks, who was engaged in building humanoid-like robots. Yoky - still thinking about tennis - took over the development of the hands, one of the most complex areas of human anatomy. Brooks would later say of her: “She repeatedly surprised me by embarking on a new sub-project in an area where she had no background, and in just two or three weeks being totally up to speed and producing working systems, and she did it again and again.”

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Grasping the problem

Once she became involved in building robots, Yoky came to realize the importance of the brain in controlling and coordinating movement. For a robot to play tennis effectively, it needs to be able to read the speed and bounce of a ball traveling at upwards of 100mph, anticipating its future position in order to return the shot. The software then needed to interface with the hardware, with a sufficient degree of control to execute the return. None of the technology available to her was equal to this task, so Yoky threw herself into solving the wide array of problems she faced. Her approach was to mimic human systems as closely as possible, designing anatomically correct hands that operated along similar principles to human muscular systems. 

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As she refined her prototypes, the wider applications of her work beyond the tennis court became more apparent to her, as did the importance of the brain in her work in order to manage the control of her prosthetics. After graduating with a masters in robotics from MIT, she returned to study for a Ph.D. in neuroscience, while taking a role as the chief engineer at Barrett Technologies, where she wrote the code for their prosthetic hands and arms. On completion of her Ph.D. she then moved to the University of Washington to become director of their Neurobotics Laboratory. It was here that she began work on the “Anatomically Correct Testbed”, a remarkable robotic hand that combined all of the knowledge she had accumulated in her previous roles, and eclipsed all previous work in the area.

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Smart Working From Home

Yoky had helped to advance prosthetic technology enormously, but in 2011 an opportunity came up in a different field that was too good to refuse; she was asked to be one of the three founders of Google X, the Mountain View firm’s new research and development arm. This began a long journey working for many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names in a new area that also fascinated Yoky and fulfilled her desire to make products that help people: the burgeoning (and frequently maligned) world of the Internet of Things. This began in earnest when she moved to Nest and developed their Learning Thermostats, which use machine learning techniques to manage domestic environments. She has also worked at Apple on health and wellness related applications, and even had a role at Twitter as a technologist, but her focus has remained on inventing products that make life easier for users facing challenges, and now she’s turned her attention to a different group in need of help; working mothers and their families. 

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As a mother of four herself, Yoky understands better than most the challenges faced by working mothers, and so in 2021 she launched Yohana, a service with the goal of helping “busy families find more balance, prioritize well-being, and be more present for each other”.  This is achieved through an AI-powered personal assistant - backed up with human copilot support - which combines the traditional jobs of to-do list and task management with tools that tackle mundane but time consuming administrative tasks, enabling parents to “do things better and get them done sooner, so they can be present for the moments that really matter.” These goals are typical of Yoky’s career, which has always focused on designing contraptions and applications that solve problems for people, and with her track record of pushing the technological envelope to deliver functional technical solutions - whether it be in the field of neurobotics, or the home - there’s little doubt that this Secret Superhero is going to continue to find ways to make our lives easier in future.

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