BackgroundTo determine the behavior of physicians regarding medical literature reading and participation in research activities at one of the largest teaching hospitals in Pakistan.MethodThis descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted by interviewing the house officers, residents and fellows of six major specialties (Medicine, Surgery, Pediatrics, Psychology, Obstetrics & Gynecology and Anesthesia) in Civil Hospital, Karachi between August and December, 2011. The questionnaire elicited responses regarding the reading habits of physicians, preferred sources of information, their participation in research activities (publication & supervision) and views regarding journal club. SPSS 17.0 was used for data entry and analysis.ResultA total of 259 completely filled questionnaires were returned with a response rate of 85.19%. Mean age of the participants was 29.67 ± 7.65 years. Books were selected by 71.4% doctors as their preferred source of information, regardless of their clinical specialties. (p < 0.05). E-journals were preferred by 75.7% of the doctors over printed journals. This holds true for doctors from all specialties (p < 0.05). The ease of searching for relevant articles was the major contributor (50.5%) in preference of e-journals. 137 (52.9%) doctors read 5 or less articles per week. 30 (11.6%) doctors have subscription of journals (printed or electronic). At least one research paper has been published by 151 (58.3%) of the physicians interviewed. Most common reason for not participating in research activities was busy schedule (56.4%). Almost half (49.4%) doctors reported lack of journal club in their units. Of these, majority (88.35%) wanted a journal club in their respective units.ConclusionUrgent intervention is required to promote healthcare literature reading and writing practice in our physicians. Easy access to workplace computers with internet and subscription of paid journals will facilitate physicians. Lack of supervisors and busy schedule were reported to be important contributors for not participating in research. Addressing these issues will encourage doctors to participate more in research activities.

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The increasing average human age and a growing number of old age population over the globe have emerged the need for automation in the health care domain. Eventually, health care robots will contribute to manage the workload of the care providers in the future health care domain. Elderly people face a major challenge to identify and pronounce names of daily use objects and different family and friends due to dementia-related issues. One of the many tasks by AI-Enabled elderly care humanoid robots will be communication with such patients. They will aid them to remember objects and persons they find difficult to identify and recognize due to dementia. This study has investigated the potential of the JD humanoid robot for object identification in such a scenario. The study has presented a prototype AI-Enabled elderly care robot that can aid elder persons to identify different objects. The robot is trained on ImageNet data set for object identification. Further, a personalized data set comprising of faces of different persons labeled by names of family and friends are also used to train robots for family recognition aid. The JD Humanoid robot captures an image of an object/person and also tracks it as the object/face moves. It identifies input images and outputs in audio format the name of the object/person to guide the elderly person. The third feature of the robot is the notifications of daily routine tasks for elder people like reminders for prayer, exercise walk, and medicine intake. Testing results have shown an object and person identification with 95% accuracy.

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