Event
LA Hacks
Team
Ashley Zhou, Jonathan Pan, Maan Viral Patel, Vyom Shah
Residue is a personalized focus intelligence platform built by students for students. Instead of treating productivity as a simple timer, Residue learns how different acoustic environments affect a user’s ability to focus. By analyzing sound patterns, study behavior, and productivity signals, the platform helps students discover the environments where they perform best and provides personalized recommendations to improve future study sessions.
What it solves
Most productivity tools focus on measuring study time rather than understanding what actually helps people concentrate. Students often rely on trial and error to determine whether they work better in silence, with background noise, in a library, or in a café. Residue removes the guesswork by identifying the acoustic conditions that correlate with stronger focus and turning those insights into personalized recommendations. The result is a more effective and data-driven approach to studying.
What it does
Residue analyzes a user’s study environment in real time and builds a personalized focus profile based on acoustic patterns and productivity signals. Over time, it learns factors such as preferred noise levels, beneficial frequency ranges, and environmental conditions that support concentration. The platform can recommend soundscapes like brown noise, rain, or café ambience, generate personalized ambient audio, and even match students with compatible study partners based on their focus preferences and acoustic profiles.
How it works
Residue combines real-time acoustic analysis, productivity tracking, AI-powered recommendations, and personalized learning into a single platform. Using on-device and browser-based processing, the system analyzes environmental sound characteristics, correlates them with focus and productivity metrics, and continuously refines a user’s personal focus profile. AI agents then provide recommendations, generate custom soundscapes, and suggest interventions that help users return to their optimal study state. Through ZETIC Melange, the mobile companion also supports on-device AI capabilities, enabling privacy-preserving focus insights without relying entirely on cloud services.