“India is very dynamic, I’d love to go there,” Apple CEO Tim Cook commented a day before the keynote address at the tech giant’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), where the artificial intelligence strategy as well as the next versions of software including iOS, iPadOS and macOS will be unveiled. Cook met with Apple CEO-elect John Ternes and the distinguished winners of the Swift Student Challenge. It underlines Apple’s continued focus on the developer community, and gives student developers a chance to showcase their creativity and coding skills.
Distinguished winners who submitted their creations to Cook and Turnus include India’s Gayatri Gondadakar with the Steady Hands app, Germany’s Anton Baranov who developed a pitch coach tool leveraging Apple’s Foundation Model framework, South Korean Yoonjae Jong who used Anthropic’s Cloud, OpenAI’s Codex, and Google’s Gemini to build the Laviola musical instrument learning app using Apple’s CoreML and Rino Ito of Japan who developed it. ColortheGoalDaruma app that focuses on goal-setting inspired by traditional Daruma dolls.
“Gayathri’s app is a beautiful example of how technology can empower creativity and make art more accessible to everyone. Using the power of the iPad and the Apple Pencil, she is helping individuals with tremors express themselves and share their art with the world. It’s so inspiring to see Indian developers like Gayathri use their talents in the service of others, and I know their future is bright,” said Tim Cook, Apple CEO. Said.
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The underlying theme of this year’s winning presentations from 37 countries is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for accessibility use cases.
Goundadkar, a 20-year-old third-year computer science student at Maharashtra Institute of Technology World Peace University, told HT in a conversation that the idea for the Steady Hands app came about one day when his grandmother was diagnosed with essential hand tremors (or Essential Tremors, or ET). It’s a neurological disorder that causes involuntary, rhythmic tremors, usually in the hands, and she can no longer create art.
She says, “As a child, I loved making things. I used to sit for hours with my grandmother with a sketchbook and pencil. After a lot of research, I learned that my grandmother was not alone.”
Steady Hands, an app that Goundadkar says is pending patent and will soon be listed on the Apple App Store, seeks to create a solution for the millions of people around the world who suffer from essential tremor as a condition. The app was ready in about a month’s time, she says.
As far as existing solutions go, she says that “they only focus on helping a person track eating or track medication or track surgery, but there was nothing out there that could help a person draw or write again.” Steady Hands uses AI to calculate and compensate for vibration when fixing a drawing or sketch or handwritten element created using Apple Pencil, so that it looks exactly as intended by the user.
Goundakar’s Steady Hands app uses Apple’s developer-focused frameworks including SceneKit and RealityKit and is built using Swift. At the core of the app is the Accelerate Framework on which the app is built – that is, the ability to take tests, analyze raw motion data to identify and determine the user’s vibration intensity and frequency. This creates, what Goundadkar calls, a personalized tremor profile.
For example, although multiple users cannot set up their account on this app on the same iPad, she confirms that this test can be taken multiple times and the app’s features will be changed accordingly.
“When someone starts drawing, it will automatically detect vibrations in their drawing to remove those vibrational movements and maintain the intention,” she explains. Goundadkar says most of his research was a mix of medicine and behavior. “Tremors are not the same for every person and I need to understand the medical causes. The severity, direction and consistency varies, which is why I can’t use a number-based system,” she says.
Goundadkar says that in addition to Apple’s developer-centric tools, Anthropic’s Cloud and OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped him a lot in his research. “They were also very useful when I had to integrate RealityKit and SceneKit because I had very little time,” she explains. Steady Hands was set to be presented over a period of one month, as part of Apple’s Swift Students Challenge for this year.
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For someone so young, clarity is not Goundadkar’s weak link. She’s very candid about the app’s vision, and admits to the rough edges. “I could have made the interface better, and I’m working on it. There are more accessibility features,” she says.
She explains, “One can lose one’s entire identity due to hand tremors. It’s not just about losing passion. During testing, I found people who were not able to do basic tasks like signing a cheque.” When asked about a potential feature that would help users with everyday tasks like document signing beyond creating art, Goundadkar explains that they had developed a feature called Signatures within Steady Hands, the idea of which was to help users with the task. But she says this iteration proved complicated for users.
“What I focused on more was incorporating a variety of exercises that help with all types of hand movements, so they can maintain control over them over time. These exercises will help them eat, help them with their signing and help them with writing again,” she says. Another thing on which young Goundadkar refuses to compromise is his intention to receive feedback from the user community. As the base expands, it will become important to understand usage trends and integrate features that have been requested into future iterations.