The Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Industrial Technology Association have selected Lee Hu-man, CEO of Exosystems Inc., and Jeon Chang-hoon, a manager at LG Display Co., as the recipients of the ‘Korea Engineer Award’ for September 2026. The two were recognized for their contributions to industrial innovation, having developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology to assist in diagnosing sarcopenia and a technology for the optical correction of OLED panels, respectively.
 [코리안투데이] Lee Hu-man, CEO of Exosystems Inc., and Jeon Chang-hoon, a manager at LG Display Co., recipients of the September 2026 Korea Engineer Award © 장형임 기자 |
The Ministry of Science and ICT (led by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon) and the Korea Industrial Technology Association (chaired by Koo Ja-kyun) announced on the 14th that Lee Hu-man, CEO of Exosystems Inc., and Jeon Chang-hoon, a manager at LG Display Co., had been selected as the recipients of the ‘Korea Engineer Award’ for September 2026.
The ‘Korea Engineer Award’ is a program to honor outstanding engineers, created to encourage technological innovation in industry and foster a culture that respects engineers. It confers the Deputy Prime Minister’s Award (Minister of Science and ICT Award) and a prize of 5 million won on engineers who have made significant contributions in the field. Funded by the Ministry’s Science and Technology Promotion Fund and the Lottery Fund, the program has been operating since 2002. Recipients are announced monthly through a process of public notice and selection held twice a year at six-month intervals, with a total of 33 recipients chosen annually and a combined awards ceremony held twice a year.
Exosystems Inc., led by CEO Lee Hu-man, was founded in 2017 by a researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) through the Ministry’s laboratory startup support program (TeX-Corps). Since its establishment, the company has steadily taken part in government research and development (R&D) projects, including the development of an AI-based personalized exercise platform (multi-ministry, 2020–2025, 4.4 billion won) and a digital therapeutic device for sarcopenia (Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, 2020–2026, 3.2 billion won), building up its innovation capabilities. As a result, the company has registered more than 15 domestic and international patents related to digital healthcare and has won the CES Innovation Award three times for its digital biomarker and rehabilitation solution technologies.
Conventional diagnosis of sarcopenia required the sequential assessment of several indicators, such as muscle mass, muscle strength, and walking speed, which was both time-consuming and costly. Tests involving physical activity, such as walking, were also difficult to administer to patients with limited mobility. To address this, Lee developed a proprietary indicator known as the Muscle Function Index (MFI), a technology that uses AI to learn from and analyze muscle signals responding to various frequency stimuli (evoked surface electromyography) in order to quantify neuromuscular function. This diagnostic-aid software, based on a digital biomarker, was designated an innovative medical device by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in 2024, and the underlying technology received New Excellent Technology (NET) certification in 2025. In effect, it has opened the way for even patients with limited mobility to have their sarcopenia assessed simply and objectively.
‘I hope that a technology capable of measuring neuromuscular function easily and objectively will be of real help in the rehabilitation field,’ Lee said in his acceptance remarks. ‘I will continue to advance the technology and contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of the domestic digital healthcare industry.’
LG Display Co., where Jeon Chang-hoon works, operates five corporate research institutes recognized by the Ministry, including its Paju Research Institute. The company has participated in government R&D efforts to develop core next-generation display technologies, including the development of stretchable and foldable displays (Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, 2020–2024, 6 billion won) and the development of OLED materials and device technologies (Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, 2024–present, 3.5 billion won). Jeon, who joined the company in 2003, is a top-tier domestic OLED technology expert who has developed image-quality correction technologies for 23 years.
OLED is regarded as a display with low power consumption and excellent contrast ratio and color reproduction. However, in the process of creating each individual pixel, image quality could deteriorate when organic materials were not applied uniformly or when the performance of the electrical switches varied slightly. In addition to a technology that quantifies and corrects the degree of unevenness in images captured by a camera, Jeon recently introduced a technology that uses a deep-learning model specialized in visual data analysis (CNN) to predict the original high-resolution image and correct image quality. Through this, he improved image-quality uniformity by more than 100% and reduced the correction time in ultra-low-luminance (below 0.01 nit) conditions by more than 75%. By applying an iterative correction method that uses the saved time to perform additional correction work, he lowered the defect rate at the 0.01-nit level from around 40% to less than 0.5%, contributing to improvements in product yield and profitability.
‘Based on the technological innovation capabilities and experience I have accumulated, I will continue to do my utmost so that the domestic OLED industry can lead the global market and strengthen its future technological competitiveness,’ Jeon said.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said it plans to further strengthen the rewards and recognition given to outstanding engineers who have improved the quality of people’s lives through technological innovation, and to pursue technology-led growth in which the public and private sectors work together, including by supporting the diffusion of research outcomes based on industry-academia-research cooperation.
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