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This study aims to explore perceived barriers to participating in regular physical activity (PA) among middle-aged adults in Una, Himachal Pradesh, India.

This study used qualitative methodology. The authors conducted face-to-face semi-structured interviews among adults between 40 and 60 years of age. Eleven interviews were conducted in participants’ vernacular language and were audio-recorded. The recordings were transcribed, and emergent findings were evaluated and interpreted using an open-ended method.

PA was mostly related to household chores by female participants. Male participants considered their daily tasks synonymous with PA. The main barriers identified were lack of enthusiasm/time, advancing age and declining health status, misperceptions of being physically active, lack of skill/knowledge, family responsibilities, lack of social support, lack of open spaces, parks and other facilities, and social restrictions due to the pandemic.

The findings of this study will aid in designing better interventions targeted at promoting PA. Identification of the existing modifiable barriers can be a target source for most public health programs.

The barriers existing among the community must be addressed to achieve the recommended level of PA. The promotional strategies should focus on individual factors, such as increasing self-efficiency and knowledge about recommended levels of PA. The social barriers must also be addressed through peer support and group-based activities. Health policies should emphasize making societies more active by ensuring more open spaces and parks.

Barriers to PA may differ among the socioeconomic strata and geographical locations. The present study explored barriers among working adults in an urban Indian setting.

The purpose of this study was to explore patient’s perception of their disorder.

This study used a phenomenographical approach within a qualitative research paradigm. A total of 21 patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA) were recruited for the study, and data were collected through open-ended face-to-face interviews. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analyzed. The transcribed verbatim was analyzed for themes.

The themes developed reflected the patients’ perceptions about the disease process. Thematic analysis revealed three themes: Knee OA is a degenerative disease, Knee OA is an age-related disease and Knee OA is caused by certain activities of daily living. The patient’s information varied and was limited to what had been provided by the health-care practitioner. The knowledge was more biomedical in orientation and was limited and not supported by the evidence.

There is a need to provide evidence-based information that the patient must understand. Health-care providers must use a biopsychosocial framework to discuss the disease knowledge with patients.

This study helps us in identifying disease perceptions that can be used to design education programs for knee OA patients. It also highlights the need for delivering educational programs to knee OA patients.

This study lays a foundation for further research. To the author’s best knowledge, this is the first study to explore disease perceptions using a qualitative approach conducted among patients from a lower middle-income country.

The line of balance (LOB) method is a suitable scheduling technique that managers can use to support lean planning efforts for projects composed of repetitive activities such as high-rise building construction. Like any other method, LOB has certain disadvantages that create a set of practical limitations in its application. An LOB schedule gives insights about how continuous and synchronized single resources are scheduled and how uniform these resources are distributed over the project duration. However, these three characteristics have to be visually checked, which makes the evaluation and the comparison of different schedule alternatives difficult. To overcome this problem, the purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative method to calculate quality degrees for the continuity, the synchronization and the uniformity of an LOB schedule that can be applied to assess an LOB schedule globally.

The paper introduces a set of global indicators, termed quality degrees, which allow for a quick quantitative evaluation of LOB schedules at the global level. These quality degrees are quantitative indicators for the: degree of continuity, degree of synchronization and degree of uniformity within a specific LOB alternative. A mathematical model was developed to calculate the quality degrees for LOB schedules. This model was validated using a well-known case study extracted from literature, and its practical implementation was exemplified on two real Romanian projects.

The paper illustrates this contribution using two case studies that confirm that the proposed method can be used to evaluate different schedule alternatives. In particular, the paper shows that quality indicators can be used to analyze and control interdependencies between cost and time.

The main limitation of the proposed method is that it cannot indicate the desired level of continuity, synchronization or uniformity to be achieved. Further studies need to explore this possibility, as well the relationship between indicators.

The presented quality indicators contribute to existing LOB methods as they allow for the quick analysis and assessment of schedules without an in-depth visual analysis.

The paper proposes an innovative method, mathematically formulated, to quantitatively assess the quality aspects of continuity, synchronization and uniformity for LOB schedules.

The purpose of this paper is to identify optimum crew formations at unit execution level of repetitive projects that minimize project duration, project cost, crew work interruptions and interruption costs, simultaneously.

The model consists of four modules. The first module quantifies uncertainties associated with the crew productivity rate and quantity of work using the fuzzy set theory. The second module identifies feasible boundaries for activity relaxation. The third module computes direct cost, indirect cost and interruption costs, including idle crew cost as well as mobilization and demobilization costs. The fourth module identifies near-optimum crew formation using a newly developed multi-objective optimization model.

The developed model was able to provide improvements of 0.2, 16.86 and 12.98% for minimization of project cost, crew work interruptions and interruption costs from US$1,505,960, 8.3 days and US$8,300, as recently reported in the literature, to US$1,502,979, 6.9 days and US$7,222, respectively, without impacting the optimized project duration.

The novelty of this paper lies in its activity-relaxation free float that considers the effect of postponing early finish dates of repetitive activities on crew work interruptions. The introduced new float allows for calculating the required crew productivity rate that minimizes crew work interruptions without delaying successor activities and without impacting the optimized project duration. It safeguards against assignment of unnecessary costly resources.