By Mohammad Haris Zia
Digital health tools are changing how people receive care, and engineers are helping turn research into products that patients can actually use. One of them is Mohammad Haris Zia, a Pakistani engineer whose work in digital audiology has helped build hearing-health platforms used in several countries.
For Haris, the work is personal. He watched family members slowly pull away from conversations and social events as their hearing got worse.
“You can be in the same room with someone, but no longer truly present,” he says.
That experience pushed him toward audio technology, cognitive science, and digital healthcare—areas that now often overlap as software becomes a bigger part of patient care.
Haris started his career in Pakistan. Early on, he learned from experienced engineers at major global technology companies through remote mentorship.
He says those sessions taught him to focus on reliable systems, fast performance, monitoring, and handling failures well. These ideas later shaped how he approached healthcare technology.
In health-related products, a slow or unreliable system is not just an inconvenience. It can affect the care a person receives, so dependability matters from the start.
At Neurotone AI, Haris led engineering work on Lace Pro, an auditory training platform that helps people improve how they listen and understand speech.
The platform includes exercises for understanding speech in noisy places, following fast speech, working memory, speech reading, and completing words using context.
Haris built a flexible content system that could deliver thousands of adaptive exercises across many topics.
“The brain needs the right level of difficulty, timing, and audio cues,” Haris explains. “Those details help keep the training useful and engaging.”
Clinical data linked to the platform shows that users can improve speech-in-noise recognition and speech comprehension after structured training.
As hearing tools became more advanced, Haris and his team noticed a problem with standard text-to-speech voices used in healthcare apps.
Synthetic voices can share information clearly, but they often sound flat. That can make it harder for users to stay engaged over time.
To fix this, Haris helped develop an AI voice-cloning system that creates more natural-sounding speech. Internal tests found better sentence recognition compared with standard synthetic voices.
He also worked on digital signal-processing tools for tinnitus care. These systems use methods such as spectral notching and layered masking sounds to support personalized therapy for people with tinnitus symptoms.
Localization is one of the hardest parts of digital audiology.
A hearing-training app cannot simply translate its content into another language. Accents, speech patterns, phonemes, and regional pronunciation all affect how well the training works.
Haris helped create a multi-locale audio framework that delivers region-specific sound files and phonetic content. Users in markets such as the United Kingdom and the United States get training suited to local speech while the clinical approach stays consistent.
The platform is now used by hearing-care providers in many parts of the world.
As more people began using the platform, the team had to grow its infrastructure without hurting speed or security.
Haris led updates that added modular services, caching, and automatic scaling. These changes helped the platform handle more users and larger deployments.
Healthcare platforms also need strong privacy protections. Haris put in place encryption, access controls, and automated auditing to help meet data-protection requirements.
“Trust is essential when dealing with health data,” he says.
Haris continues to work on hearing-health technology, helping shape technical strategy and product development in digital audiology.
He has also served as a judge at international technology competitions and works with people in audiology, neuroscience, and education.
Going forward, he wants to expand hearing-health content for more regions and support research that strengthens the clinical evidence behind digital health tools.
As healthcare relies more on software, engineers like Mohammad Haris Zia are helping connect technology, science, and everyday patient care.