Dresden student wins Apple's developer competition

A student from Dresden is one of the winners of an Apple programming competition with an app that recreates the experiences of people with dementia. The core of Hendrik Schülke's application, called "Dementi", is a memory game with 16 pictures. However, there is a catch: every three moves, the images in the background swap. This means that instead of the solution you thought you had, you may suddenly turn over the wrong picture. The app is designed to make it possible to experience how people with dementia struggle with their perception of reality.

Schülke was inspired to develop the app by his grandmother's dementia. His idea is for users to be surprised by the problems they encounter when solving the memory puzzle. "You think you're the problem," says Schülke, describing the feeling. "It only works once". He could imagine that children, for example, could use the app to better understand the difficulties that their relatives with dementia experience in everyday life. The app is also intended to provide information about dementia.

The 25-year-old from Dresden is a Master's student of media informatics. He wrote the applications that he wants to bring to the App Store during a semester abroad in Vietnam. Apple CEO Tim Cook praised Schülke's app for helping people to understand each other better and build empathy when he honored the competition winners before the start of the WWDC developer conference.