Emerging Alternatives to Conventional Clinic Visits in the Era of COVID-19: Adoption of Telehealth at VCU Adult Cystic Fibrosis Center.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a genetic disease in which consistent follow-up care is required to avoid a decline in pulmonary and nutritional health. It is believed that if a CF patient ceases treatment for 2 days, this can result in an exacerbation. One week of missed treatments can result in a hospitalization and 1 month of missed treatments can result in an earlier demise. With a global pandemic that has affected more than 9 million people, many CF clinics were required to take steps to avoid transmission of this dangerous virus. This may result in delays in delivery of timely CF care due to closure of clinics and pulmonary function testing (PFT) laboratories and limited staff allowed on site for conducting in-person visits. These measures, along with suggestions from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) to extend the social distancing longer than traditional CDC recommendations for the CF community, create an urgent need to explore novel ways to deliver safer care via new standards in chronic health conditions like CF. Especially, as these preventive strategies may be necessary for long-term maintenance, few objective alternatives exist to guide clinicians and allied health professionals in CF centers how to proceed in this new era. This also presents an opportunity for novel approaches that could improve delivery of CF care with remote monitoring and real-time delivery of care in patients' home environments. Such emerging approaches could benefit patient care, leading to reduced costs and readmissions and improved access to care, medication adherence, and patient communication. We summarize our own experience and discuss the emerging delivery of CF care which can be generalizable to other pulmonary illnesses.

Robust sub-micrometer displacement measurement using dual wavelength speckle correlation.

The unique characteristics of speckle correlation techniques including simple setup and fast, non-contact, high resolution measurement capability offer great potential for industrial applications. Robustness is an important requirement for industrial applications, which limits the application of many common techniques such as interferometric or photographic measurements, especially in mechanical workshops. This paper introduces an innovative technique for displacement measurement using speckle photography that is robust to disturbances, imaging errors, and does not require a large number of database patterns for calibration. It uses the relative correlation of the speckle patterns generated by two parallel, overlapping laser beams with an identical spot size and different wavelengths for relative displacement measurement in sub-micrometer order, and requires only one reference pattern that is updated frequently during the measurement process. The method is demonstrated over 200 µm range and is extendable to longer ranges.