About Intelligent Sports and Health

Intelligent Sports and Health

Overview and identity

Intelligent Sports and Health, abbreviated ISH, is an English-language, peer-reviewed, open access journal based in Beijing, China, dedicated to advancing cross-innovation across sports, medicine and engineering. It is owned by the Capital University of Physical Education and Sports in Beijing, which retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and its compiled issues, and it is produced and hosted by KeAi Communications on the university's behalf, with publishing services by Elsevier on ScienceDirect. The journal carries ISSN 3050-5445. Its first volume appeared in 2025 and its second volume in 2026, with Volume 2, Issue 1 covering pages 1 to 66 in January 2026 and Issue 2 in progress in April 2026, confirming an active quarterly publication programme. The journal aims to promote high-level athletic performance and physical and mental health through foundational theories and applied research, including original research papers, review articles and case studies.

At its launch the journal was presented as the first English-language journal in the world to focus on the integration of artificial intelligence technology with the fields of sports, engineering and medicine. That claim, made at its founding release, defines its niche precisely: plenty of journals cover sports science, and plenty cover medical artificial intelligence, but ISH was created specifically for the overlap, where computer vision, wearable sensing, big data and intelligent equipment change how athletes train, how injuries are predicted and prevented, and how health is monitored and managed.

Founding and launch

The journal was founded by the Capital Institute of Physical Education, now the Capital University of Physical Education and Sports, and was officially released on 19 October at an inaugural ceremony in Beijing. Zhang Xia, the university's president, read out a congratulatory letter from International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach at the ceremony, a detail that signals the sporting establishment's interest in the new title from its first day. He Ming, Secretary of the Party Committee of the university, also took part in the launch events. On the afternoon of the launch day the journal held its first editorial board meeting, with more than 40 editorial board members and advisory team members from more than 10 countries and regions participating online and offline.

The founding editors articulated the journal's ambition in complementary terms. Miguel Angel Gomez Ruano, an editor-in-chief of ISH and a professor at a Madrid engineering university in Spain, said he hoped ISH would become the go-to source of groundbreaking research bridging science, sports, artificial intelligence and health. Dai Qionghai, also an editor-in-chief, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Tsinghua University, said the birth of ISH conformed to the trend of continuous development of artificial intelligence and injected new vitality into the field of sports and health. Liu Chenglin, the executive editor-in-chief and a researcher at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, described the journal as committed to promoting interdisciplinary innovation across sports, medicine and engineering and to advancing high-level sports performance and human health. The editorial office is at the university, with Ms. Tu Lv as the contact and the office email at the university's cupes.edu.cn domain.

Publisher and publishing model

Production and hosting are by KeAi on behalf of the Capital University of Physical Education and Sports, and peer review is under the responsibility of the journal's editorial board. KeAi Communications is the Beijing open access joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing and Media and Elsevier, repurposed as an open access journal publishing service provider in 2013 and now publishing more than 280 scholarly journals. Through KeAi, ISH articles are hosted on ScienceDirect, where the journal's issues and individual articles carry Elsevier DOIs in the form 10.1016/j.ish, and submissions are screened automatically using iThenticate CrossCheck to detect plagiarism and overlapping text. For authors and readers the practical effect is that a young, specialist journal from a Beijing sports university is distributed on the same platform, with the same production standards, as long-established Elsevier titles.

Section A: Intelligent Sports

The journal is organised into three sections. Section A, Intelligent Sports, focuses on cutting-edge research on artificial intelligence technology in sports and exercise science, exploring the application of technologies such as big data analysis and computer vision in optimising athletic performance and competitive abilities. The journal's overall focus areas reinforce this: computer vision, sports intelligent equipment, sports big data, sports physiology and biochemistry, and cognitive neuroscience are named as its primary research interests. An example of Section A work visible in the journal's early contents is a research article on how situational variables affect match running performance in elite soccer, drawing evidence from FC Barcelona, a study that depends on exactly the combination of performance data, contextual variables and quantitative analysis the section exists to publish.

Section B: Intelligent Health

Section B, Intelligent Health, focuses on artificial intelligence technology in human health. It covers the use of intelligent computing and big data algorithms for the biology of sport, data-driven prediction of injuries and decision support systems for rehabilitation, research on the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare, and the gathering and analysis of physiological data through intelligent devices, improving early disease prediction and prevention with AI technology, together with personalised health management and self-regulation. The section therefore extends the journal beyond elite sport into everyday health: the same sensing and prediction methods used to keep a professional athlete available for selection can be applied to rehabilitation after injury, to early warning of disease, and to the management of an individual's own health data.

Section C: Intelligent Sport Equipment and Monitoring

Section C, Intelligent Sport Equipment and Monitoring, covers the hardware side of the field: robotics, exoskeletons, wearable devices and brain-computer interfaces, as recorded in the journal's scope summary, together with the intelligent equipment and monitoring systems that generate the data on which Sections A and B depend. This three-part structure is one of the journal's clearest design decisions. Performance analysis without equipment produces no data; health prediction without monitoring produces no signal; and equipment without analysis produces no insight. By housing all three in one journal with a single, deliberately interdisciplinary editorial board, ISH gives engineers, clinicians and sports scientists a shared venue instead of forcing each community to publish its half of a system in a different literature.

Article types, peer review and standards

The journal publishes original research papers, review articles and case studies, and its guide for authors applies the standard KeAi and Elsevier framework: a single corresponding author communicates with the journal during the editorial process, all authors must meet authorship criteria covering conception and design or data acquisition and analysis, drafting or critical revision, and final approval, and competing interests, funding sources and ethics approvals must be declared as applicable. Submissions are screened for similarity before review, and authors are encouraged to provide ORCID identifiers. The journal states that its meticulously curated editorial board integrates multiple disciplines and that it upholds high academic standards and integrity in order to provide an academic communication platform for interdisciplinary research across sports, medicine and engineering. For a field in which commercial equipment, team interests and health data intersect, those declarations and screening steps are substantive safeguards rather than formalities.

Open access, charges and schedule

Intelligent Sports and Health is a fully open access journal: every article is immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. The standard open access publication fee is USD 1,000 plus taxes, payable by authors or on their behalf by a funder or institution, but all article publishing charges for articles submitted before 31 December 2027 are fully waived, so authors publishing during the journal's establishment period pay nothing. Copyright in the compiled journal and its issues is retained by the Capital University of Physical Education and Sports, while KeAi Communications and the university are granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights, and individual articles are universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity immediately after publication. The journal is published quarterly, four issues per year, consistent with the January and April 2026 issues recorded on ScienceDirect.

Readership and significance

The journal serves sports scientists, clinicians and rehabilitation specialists, biomedical and equipment engineers, data scientists working on human performance, and coaches and performance staff who use published evidence. Its significance lies in timing and position as much as in scope: it was launched from Beijing, with Olympic-movement recognition at its founding ceremony, an international first editorial board drawn from more than ten countries and regions, and editors-in-chief spanning Chinese engineering academia and European sports science, just as wearable monitoring, computer vision and predictive analytics became routine in elite sport. For WorldNM's directory, Intelligent Sports and Health is recorded at its Beijing base, ISSN 3050-5445, with its official KeAi journal page as its website, as a young quarterly whose first two volumes and named founding leadership give it a verifiable record well beyond a launch announcement.