Toronto Developer Elena Galluzzo Wins Apple’s Swift Student Challenge With Care Capsule

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A 22-year-old developer from Toronto was one of the winners of Apple’s Swift Student Challenge with an app built around something close to home: the experience of growing up in a house with her grandparents.

Elena Galluzzo spoke to Double Tap’s Marc Aflalo on our AMI-tv sister show Access Tech Live shortly after returning from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

“Care Capsule is a Playground I submitted to this year’s Swift Student Challenge, and it’s meant to help assist with daily tasks for the elderly,” she said — setting up a medication schedule, keeping track of reminders and tasks, and letting users build albums of positive memories to look back on.

It also carries a chatbot, built on logic and machine learning, that answers questions about the app itself for users who are not especially technical. If it detects low sentiment in a user’s messages, it surfaces mental health resources.

Built from living with her grandparents

The brief was to build a Swift Playground. The subject was Galluzzo’s own.

“My inspiration was the fact that I’ve lived with my grandparents for my entire life,” she said. What struck her was how unusual that is. “My grandparents have a large care network. I live with my parents and sister as well. But not everybody has that kind of care network.”

Without one, she reasoned, it becomes easier to lose track of daily tasks when memory is not what it was, and easier to become isolated. “So those are things that inspired me to create a Playground like Care Capsule — and also the fact that Canada has an aging population.”

Meeting Tim Cook, unannounced

Galluzzo described a packed schedule at WWDC and hands-on sessions with other student winners. The highlight arrived without warning.

“We weren’t aware that we were meeting Tim Cook until Tim Cook entered the room, so that was really a great surprise,” she said. “Because it was a surprise, we didn’t even have time to be nervous about it. He was very nice, very enthusiastic, and very encouraging, and was really interested in hearing the inspiration behind our apps.”

Of the announcements that week, the one she was most eager to use was Swift Assist. “I think that the concept sounds so cool. It’ll help speed up the development process for sure.”

What happens to Care Capsule next

Galluzzo has since moved Care Capsule from a Playground into a full Xcode project, with the aim of releasing it on the App Store.

Her advice to other young developers was straightforward. “If you have an idea that you want to create and you think that it would be useful for yourself or for other people, or just something that you think would be enjoyable — it doesn’t have to have a specific purpose. I would say just go for it. It’s really rewarding to be able to create something that you’re proud of and that people can use.”

Resources

• Swift Student Challenge: developer.apple.com/swift-student-challenge