Abstract

A growing number of studies have shown that people with dementia can participate in a wide range of everyday activities with the help of caregivers or caretakers in their families. However, very little is known about the situated practices caregivers use to help dementia patients participate actively in novel joint activities. This study focuses on the interactional organization of instructions in joint activities involving people with dementia who have never used touchscreen technologies and their caregivers, using the use of tablet computers as an example. The review depends on 41 video accounts of ten dyads, each containing an individual living with dementia and a carer, as they are utilizing tablet PCs with applications fit to individual interests. We demonstrate, utilizing multimodal interaction analysis, that the caregivers rarely take on their own responsibilities for concluding an ongoing joint project, despite constantly fostering their interlocutors’ accomplishments. According to our findings, the participants with dementia benefit from the caregivers’ verbal and embodied directives as a form of scaffolding practice that helps them coordinate their visual perception and embodied behavior.