About Tinnitus Toolkit

Built by a scientist who got tinnitus and wasn't satisfied with what existed.

THE STORY

It started with a hiss.

One day there was a new sound — constant, uninvited, and apparently permanent. Like most people, the first instinct was to search for answers. What followed was weeks of reading: forum posts, audiologist websites, app store listings, and a lot of vague reassurance dressed up as information.

It wasn't good enough.

Most apps offered white noise or generic relaxation exercises. Most websites repeated the same surface-level explanations. The peer-reviewed research — which was actually quite specific about mechanisms, protocols, and outcomes — was sitting behind journal paywalls, largely inaccessible to the people who needed it most.

BACKGROUND

A scientist, not a clinician.

The developer behind Tinnitus Toolkit has a background in chemical technology research — not audiology or medicine. But research training is research training: how to read a study critically, how to assess methodology, how to distinguish a robust finding from an outlier, and how to synthesise across a body of literature rather than cherry-pick.

Those skills transferred directly. The result is an app built not on intuition or marketing language, but on a careful reading of the published evidence — with every therapy traceable to a specific peer-reviewed study.

Tinnitus Toolkit is not a medical product and does not replace clinical care. It is a self-management tool built on published research.
WHY IT EXISTS

The gap this fills.

There are three things most tinnitus apps get wrong:

  • Generic sound. White noise masks tinnitus temporarily. It doesn't target the auditory system in any specific way. The therapies in this app each work through a distinct mechanism — EAE, band-gap, flanking band, and SMR are not interchangeable with each other or with a rain sounds playlist.
  • Ignoring the psychological component. The sound is only part of the problem. How the brain responds to it — the attention, the threat appraisal, the hypervigilance — is what makes tinnitus disabling for many people. CBT addresses this directly, and it's included as a separate course, not an afterthought.
  • One size fits all. Tinnitus has a frequency. Therapy works better when it's matched to yours. The app includes a frequency finder and uses your hearing profile to shape the EAE therapy to your individual audiogram.
PRINCIPLES

How this was built.

📄
Every generated sound is based on peer-reviewed research.

Not a general reference to "research" — a specific paper, with authors, journal, year, and sample size. You can read the same papers that informed the design.

🔒
Your data stays on your device.

Tinnitus frequency, hearing profile, THI scores, session history — none of it leaves your phone. No accounts, no cloud sync, no third-party sharing.

🌱
Not meant to be a cure.

The goal is adjustment — helping your brain gradually shift its relationship with the sound. Tinnitus Toolkit is designed to support that process, not promise an outcome.

🎛️
Control over automation.

You choose your therapy, set your frequency, adjust your hearing profile. The app gives you tools — it doesn't make decisions for you.