This article is in partnership with Taiwan Excellence

Winston Yang had a good life on paper. A degree from Columbia. Stints at Deutsche Bank and Deloitte. The kind of résumé that opens doors without needing an explanation.

But somewhere between the spreadsheets and the boardrooms, Yang couldn't stop thinking about a problem that had nothing to do with finance at all. 

He had spent years around athletes, watching the same painful pattern repeat itself at every level: school, college, and professional. An injury rarely just “happens”. It builds quietly first. A shoulder starts compensating for something months before anyone notices. A throwing motion shifts so slightly, week after week, that nobody clocks it, until the day it simply gives way.

Here's the part that should make anyone worried: the technology to catch this early already existed. It just lived in labs that cost more than most sports programmes would see in a decade. So unless you were already at the top, already funded, already someone's priority, you'd never get near it.

Yang decided that was a problem worth leaving a good career for. In 2017, he founded ‘IdeasLab Inc’ in New York with one question at the centre of it: what if any coach, anywhere, could have access to the same analysis that elite sports labs charge a fortune for?

The AI that reads what a coach can't see

The answer Yang built is called ‘XView AI’. It does something that, until recently, would have required a room full of equipment and a team of specialists: it reads the biomechanics of a moving human body in real time, from nothing more than a smartphone video.

No sensors. No markers taped to limbs. No internet connection. No lab.

Point a phone at a pitcher mid-throw, and XView AI maps the joint mechanics, tracks rotation speeds, and flags the specific stress points that, if left uncorrected, can become the injuries that end seasons and sometimes careers. It sees the problem before the body announces it.

The proof arrived from an unexpected place. 

Among the early people testing XView AI was KJ Choi, a nine-time PGA Tour Champion and one of the most respected names in golf. His son quietly filmed his father's swing without telling him, and ran it through the app. The AI caught something Choi himself had not: an early extension flaw and a contour failure buried deep in his mechanics. Choi fixed it.

One month later, at 54, he became the oldest Asian-born golfer to win a tournament, taking the SK Telecom Open. Three weeks after that, he won the Senior British Open. "I believe XView AI is the future of golf," he said........

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