Muscle strengthening intervention for boys with haemophilia: Developing and evaluating a best-practice exercise programme with boys, families and health-care professionals

Background: Muscle strengthening exercises have the potential to improve outcomes for boys with haemophilia, but it is unclear what types of exercise might be of benefit. We elicited the views of health-care professionals, boys and their families to create and assess a home-based muscle strengthening programme. Objective: To design and develop a muscle strengthening programme with healthcare professionals aimed at improving musculoskeletal health, and refine the intervention by engaging boys with haemophilia and their families (Study 1). Following delivery, qualitatively evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the exercise programme with the boys and the study's physiotherapists (Study 2). Design: A person-based approach was used for planning and designing the exercise programme, and evaluating it post-delivery. The following methods were utilized: modified nominal group technique (NGT) with health-care professionals; focus group with families; exit interviews with boys; and interviews with the study's physiotherapists. Results: Themes identified to design and develop the intervention included exercises to lower limb and foot, dosage, age accommodating, location, supervision and monitoring and incentivization. Programme refinements were carried out following engagement with the boys and families who commented on: dosage, location, supervision and incentivization. Following delivery, the boys and physiotherapists commented on progression and adaptation, physiotherapist contact, goal-setting, creating routines and identifying suitable timeframes, and a repeated theme of incentivization. Conclusions: An exercise intervention was designed and refined through engagement with boys and their families. Boys and physiotherapists involved in the intervention's delivery were consulted who found the exercises to be generally acceptable with some minor refinements necessary

Field on Poincare group and quantum description of orientable objects

We propose an approach to the quantum-mechanical description of relativistic orientable objects. It generalizes Wigner's ideas concerning the treatment of nonrelativistic orientable objects (in particular, a nonrelativistic rotator) with the help of two reference frames (space-fixed and body-fixed). A technical realization of this generalization (for instance, in 3+1 dimensions) amounts to introducing wave functions that depend on elements of the Poincare group $G$. A complete set of transformations that test the symmetries of an orientable object and of the embedding space belongs to the group $\Pi =G\times G$. All such transformations can be studied by considering a generalized regular representation of $G$ in the space of scalar functions on the group, $f(x,z)$, that depend on the Minkowski space points $x\in G/Spin(3,1)$ as well as on the orientation variables given by the elements $z$ of a matrix $Z\in Spin(3,1)$. In particular, the field $f(x,z)$ is a generating function of usual spin-tensor multicomponent fields. In the theory under consideration, there are four different types of spinors, and an orientable object is characterized by ten quantum numbers. We study the corresponding relativistic wave equations and their symmetry properties.Comment: 46 page