Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) has demonstrated patients’ physiological and psychosocial improvements, symptoms reduction and health-economic benefits whilst enhances the ability of the whole family to adjust to illness. However, PR remains highly inaccessible due to lack of awareness of its benefits, poor referral and availability mostly in hospitals. Novel models of PR delivery are needed to enhance its implementation while maintaining cost-efficiency. We aim to implement an innovative community-based PR programme and assess its cost-benefit. A 12-week community-based PR will be implemented in primary healthcare centres where programmes are not available. Healthcare professionals will be trained. 73 patients with CRD and their caregivers (dyads patient-caregivers) will compose the experimental group. The control group will include dyads age- and disease-matched willing to collaborate in data collection but not in PR. Patients/family-centred outcomes will be dyspnoea (modified Medical Research Council Questionnaire), fatigue (Checklist of individual strength and Functional assessment of chronic illness therapy – fatigue), cough and sputum (Leicester cough questionnaire and Cough and sputum assessment questionnaire), impact of the disease (COPD Assessment Test), emotional state (The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), number of exacerbations, healthcare utilisation, health-related quality of life and family adaptability/cohesion (Family Adaptation and Cohesion Scale). Other clinical outcomes will be peripheral (biceps and quadriceps-hand held dynamometer, 1 or 10 repetition-maximum) and respiratory (maximal inspiratory and expiratory pressures) muscle strength, muscle thickness and cross sectional area (biceps brachialis, rectus femoris and diaphragm-ultrasound imaging), exercise capacity (six-minute walk test and one-minute sit to stand test), balance (brief-balance evaluation systems test) and physical activity (accelerometer). Data will be collected at baseline, at 12 weeks, at 3- and 6-months post-PR. Changes in the outcome measures will be compared between groups, after multivariate adjustment for possible confounders, and effect sizes will be calculated. A cost-benefit analysis will be conducted. This study will enhance patients access to PR, by training healthcare professionals in the local primary healthcare centres to conduct such programmes and actively involving caregivers. The cost-benefit analysis of this intervention will provide an evidence-based insight into the economic benefit of community-based PR in chronic respiratory diseases. The trial was registered in the ClinicalTrials.gov U.S. National Library of Medicine, on 10th January, 2019 (registration number: NCT03799666 ).

Over the last few decades, we witnessed a revolution in acquiring very high resolution and accurate geo-information. One of the reasons was the advances in photonics and LiDAR, which had a remarkable impact in applications requiring information with high accuracy and/or elevated completeness, such as flood modelling, forestry, construction, and mining. Also, miniaturization within electronics played an important role as it allowed smaller and lighter aerial cameras and LiDAR systems to be carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). While the use of aerial imagery acquired with UAV is becoming a standard procedure in geo-information extraction for several applications, the use of LiDAR for this purpose is still in its infancy. In several countries, companies have started to commercialize products derived from LiDAR data acquired using a UAV but not always with the necessary expertise and experience. The LIDAR-derived products’ price has become very attractive, but their quality must meet the contracted specifications. Few studies have reported on the quality of outsourced LiDAR data acquired with UAV and the problems that need to be handled during production. There can be significant differences between the planning and execution of a commercial project and a research field campaign, particularly concerning the size of the surveyed area, the volume of the acquired data, and the strip processing. This work addresses the quality control of LiDAR UAV data through outsourcing to develop a modelling-based flood forecast and alert system. The contracted company used the Phoenix Scout-16 from Phoenix LiDAR Systems, carrying a Velodyne VLP-16 and mounted on a DJI Matrice 600 PRO Hexacopter for an area of 560 ha along a flood-prone area of the Águeda River in Central Portugal.

Given an orthogonal polygon P, let |Π(P)| be the number of rectangles that result when we partition P by extending the edges incident to reflex vertices towards INT(P). In [4] we have shown that |Π(P)| ≤ 1+r+r ², where r is the number of reflex vertices of P. We shall now give sharper bounds both for max _p |Π(P)| and min _p |Π(P)|. Moreover, we characterize the structure of orthogonal polygons in general position for which these new bounds are exact. We also present bounds on the area of grid n-ogons and characterize those having the largest and the smallest area.