Gwangju Health University · AI Sports Tech Research Center

We measure the aging brain while the body is moving.

Most of what we know about the older brain comes from people lying still. We record cortical haemodynamics during gait, dual-task and loaded movement, because that is when frailty actually shows itself.

fNIRS · prefrontal montage · 8 ch — REST
Scroll

What we work on

Four questions, one instrument set.

Ageing, pain and athletic performance are usually studied by different people in different buildings. They share a substrate: how the cortex allocates resources to a body under load. We study that substrate directly.

fNIRS · Gait · Dual-task

Frailty as a brain phenotype

Frailty is scored at the body but decided in the cortex. We phenotype older adults across physical, cognitive, psychological and social axes, then ask which prefrontal signatures separate the subtypes.

tDCS · rTMS · Quantitative sensory testing

Pain that outlives its injury

Central sensitisation, pain neuroscience education, and non-invasive brain stimulation in chronic musculoskeletal pain, where the tissue has healed and the map has not.

3D motion · IMU · Force

Movement under load

Orthopaedic manual therapy and sports medicine: how the neuromuscular system reorganises after injury, and what separates a compensation from a recovery.

Multimodal AI · Community cohorts

Prediction that reaches the clinic

Models built on cohort, wearable and neuroimaging data, validated in living labs, not only in held-out test sets.

Read the research

AI Sports Tech Research Center

A lab with a research centre behind it.

The lab is anchored in the AI Sports Tech Research Center at Gwangju Health University. The centre gives the work its instruments and, harder to obtain, its access to people.

In the labTwo fNIRS systems, tDCS, HRV, respiration and actigraphy, markerless 3D motion and gait analysis
In the fieldSmart Care Village (689 m², 5,000+ residents), AI Healthcare Donggu Tower, and an integrated-care network across four district offices
DesignUrban and rural sites built into every protocol for external validity
ReachClinical, engineering and international collaborators across ageing and human performance

Publications

The record.

Peer-reviewed output across neurorehabilitation, pain science and geriatric exercise medicine.

56 Peer-reviewed papers
SCI(E) / ESCI / KCI indexed
495 Citations
h-index 12 · i10-index 16

Bibliometrics retrieved 2026.07 · Google Scholar · ORCID

See all publications ORCID

Join us

Work with the lab.

We collaborate with clinicians, engineers and international groups working on ageing, pain and human performance. Students interested in fNIRS or geriatric rehabilitation are welcome to write.

Get in touch