When Dr. Kavya Nair visited her grandmother’s village in Kerala, she noticed that almost every elderly person with hearing loss had a hearing aid — sitting unused in a drawer. The batteries were expensive, the nearest repair shop was two hours away, and the devices whistled.
She resigned from her audio engineering role in California and moved back to Bengaluru to start over with a single brief: a device that would still be working after three years in a village.
Built to be fixed
The SoundSeed aid uses a small solar charging case, a modular shell that local mobile-repair shops can open with a standard screwdriver, and firmware that can be tuned from a phone app by trained community health workers.
Good design is not about adding features. It is about removing every reason a person might stop using the device.
Priced at ₹1,999, it now reaches more than 60,000 people through NGOs and state health programmes. Kavya’s next goal is a paediatric version for school screening camps.
