{"slug": "saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults", "title": "Saratoga teen develops AI-powered hearing aid to help older adults", "summary": "Arjun Goli, a 14-year-old Saratoga student, developed an AI-powered hearing aid that transcribes speech, translates languages, and enhances specific sounds in noisy environments. Inspired by his grandparents' hearing difficulties, Goli refined the device after feedback from seniors and won $10,000 in seed funding. The project earned second place at the 2025 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship.", "body_md": "**Getting your**\n\n[Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...What began as a mandatory school assignment could lead to a lifetime purpose for a Saratoga student.\n\nArjun Goli, 14, developed an AI-powered hearing aid that can transcribe speech to text, translate it into another language and enhance the source of one sound in a noisy room. He has been working on this project for about two years with input from seniors from Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino and San Jose.\n\nAs middle school student at Challenger School’s Strawberry Park campus in West San Jose, Goli had to participate in a science fair. The students were encouraged to pursue projects that address a problem in their community. Goli looked at his own home, where his grandparents, who were in their 70s, had trouble hearing, so he wanted to create something that addressed that barrier.\n\nGoli’s first version of his hearing aid was a simple speech-to-text machine. A microphone was connected to a piece of hardware and connected to a computer or a phone, which would then process speech and transcribe the text on the screen. It was met with positive responses at his school, and they encouraged him to enter it into the 2025 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship, where he won second place in the physical science and engineering category.\n\n“That experience made me realize that this project has some potential. It’s not just something that I came up with for some mandatory school science fair,” Goli said. “That’s where the idea became something bigger and I decided to pursue it more seriously.”\n\nGoli then began to develop the second version of his hearing aid, but he needed money and more feedback. He applied to to a grant program with Lead4Change.org, a leadership service program funded by businessman David Novak. As part of the program, Goli went to Morning Star Senior Living in West San Jose for feedback on his design from elderly residents.\n\nHis first pitch brought in between five and eight residents but was met with pallid responses. Goli recalled that one woman said that his design wouldn’t help her, garnering agreement from her peers.\n\n“I felt crushed. I felt pretty disappointed,” Goli said. “But I think it was equally important because it showed me that not every iteration is going to be perfect.”\n\nInstead of becoming disheartened and demotivated, Goli took the feedback he received and recorded improvements he could make on the hearing aid. As a result, he won $10,000 in seed funding for the project.\n\nThe second version of his hearing aid aimed to amplify the sound of a specific person’s voice in a conversation in a noisy environment. Goli said it melds neuroscience with computer science. He developed a wearable hardware platform and a system that uses machine learning models and artificial intelligence for auditory attention decoding.\n\nThe brain emits tiny electrical signals when a person is paying attention to one sound over others, which can be detected with sensors on an electroencephalogram, or EEG. Auditory attention decoding tries to read those EEG signals and figure out which speaker the person wants to hear.\n\nSome hearing aids on the market perform similar functions with artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms and directional microphones, including Phonak Audeo Sphere, Unitron Blu and Starkey Edge AI, according to hearing aid specialists at American Hearing + Audiology.\n\n“I think that hearing aids shouldn’t be just about making sound louder,” Goli said. “It should be smarter in that it uses more efficient methods to increase the volume of sound that actually matters.”\n\nGoil went back to Morning Star Senior Living and pitched the second version of his hearing aid to a group of 20 to 30 older adults, with much more positive response than the first time.\n\nThrough his first experience as an inventor, Goli said he gained basic engineering and iteration skills and used machine learning capabilities to create and code the algorithms employed by his hearing aid. But ultimately, the project gave him the skills to continue working on something consistently. He said he might follow a career in neuroscience, computer science or a combination of the two.\n\n“Before I even started the project, like in seventh grade, I was mostly just playing video games and focused on schoolwork, but afterward, I started becoming more self-motivated,” Goli said.\n\nHis hearing aid project has been praised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a global network of STEM professionals with the goal of using technology to help humanity. His work was recognized by Saratoga Mayor Chuck Page at a city council meeting in February.\n\nGoli is working with professors from UCLA on some technicalities of his project and has a patent pending for his design. He says he’ll look to others to develop it.\n\nIn the future, Goli said he hopes to create a project that is able to help communities around the world.\n\n“I think my greatest goal would be to be recognized as someone who’s able to help people,” Goli said, “an innovator who’s able to create things to make people’s lives better.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults", "canonical_source": "https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/07/08/saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults/", "published_at": "2026-07-08 14:20:19+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-08 14:43:55.274349+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-products", "ai-startups", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Arjun Goli", "Challenger School", "Synopsys Science & Technology Championship", "Lead4Change.org", "David Novak", "Morning Star Senior Living", "Phonak Audeo Sphere", "Starkey Edge AI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/saratoga-teen-develops-ai-powered-hearing-aid-to-help-older-adults.jsonld"}}