Assisted eating as a communicative activity : A framework of joint attention and co-ordinated embodied actions

Background: This study aims to further the understanding of communication involv-ing people with late-stage dementia by highlighting assisted eating as an interactive joint activity. Assisted eating is, on the surface, primarily a care activity with the purpose of feeding the assisted person and thereby facilitating nutritional uptake. Helping someone to eat requires, nevertheless, fine-grained communication and co-ordination of both attention and embodied actions. Method: Using video recordings where a person with late-stage dementia is pro-vided with assistance to eat, we show how assisted eating is sequentially organized into smaller, local communicative projects, and how each project's completion is contingent upon the temporal co-ordination of the participants' attention and embodied actions. Results: The analysis shows how actions necessary to carry out the eating (e.g., manipulating the food, bringing the food to the mouth) are also inherently commu-nicative and achieved through an embodied participation framework. Discussion/conclusion: Our findings show that while the caregiving staff perform most of the actions required in the assisted eating, the person with dementia is a central agent whose actions -displays of engagement and disengagement -are deci-sive for the progression of the eating activity and play central roles in the interactive achievement of the activity.