By June Cheong

Play card games with your grandparents and help them stave off the ravages of dementia.

That is what the creators of a range of card games called A-HAH! - targeted at those aged 55 and above - are hoping for.

'Through working on these cards and learning more about the condition, I realised dementia patients need people to talk to and to have their minds engaged,' said

Ms Shereen Pong, 24, co-creator of the A-HAH! card games.

Dementia is a condition where significant loss of intellectual abilities like memory capacity affects one's normal functioning.

Ms Pong and her co-creator, Mr Daniel Ling, 25, are part of >60 Design Centre, an institution that studies the ageing process and comes up with design solutions to better the lives of the elderly.

The design centre was approached by the Alzheimer's Disease Association (ADA) last September to create a product to make playtime for caregivers and dementia patients more enjoyable.

Ms Pong said: 'The caregivers we spoke to said some of the games they're playing are quite boring.

'Patients also didn't enjoy being treated like kids. A lot of the games and tools they used like puzzles and colouring books are kids' toys.'

After three months of consultation with doctors from ADA and caregivers of dementia patients, and numerous visits to elderly day-care centres, Ms Pong and Mr Ling came up with two sets of card games, A-HAH! Fruito and A-HAH! Memoritz.

The former comprises 40 cards on which are printed pictures of 10 fruits, with each card showing a part of a fruit.

The latter is made up of 40 cards with 20 pairs of pictures of nostalgic objects and numbers from 0 to 9 emblazoned on them.

Both card sets can be played in a number of ways and help to stimulate patients' memory capability, improve their visual recognition of everyday objects and hone their problem-solving skills.

The cards were launched at the 24th Conference of Alzheimer's Disease International last week and 10,000 sets will be manufactured.

They were tested on dementia patients and further adapted to suit their needs. For example, the size of the cards was made bigger as the original - the size of normal poker cards - proved too hard for the elderly to handle. The pictures and numbers were also too small to be read clearly by the elderly.

Mr Ling said: 'At the start, the patients said they were too old to learn new games and were reluctant to play.

'But they ended up enjoying themselves.'

Each A-HAH! card game retails at $15 (excluding GST) and is available from the Alzheimer's Disease Association. For more information, call 6353-8734 or e-mail alzheimers.tp@pacific.net.sg.

This article was first published in Mind Your Body, The Straits Times.