Assisted eating as a communicative activity

Background: This study aims to further the understanding of communication involving 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 provided 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 communicative 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 decisive for the progression of the eating activity and play central roles in the interactive achievement of the activity.