- New
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010011
- Feb 11, 2026
- Digital
- Pavlo Nosov + 7 more
The article presents a unified fractal approach to processing and analyzing ship trajectories based on AIS and ECDIS data. A comprehensive algorithmic pipeline is proposed, which provides time normalization, coordinate transformation, calculation of dynamic motion characteristics, and application of fractal analysis in sliding windows. This approach allows for the stable calculation of key parameters (course, angular velocity, deviation from the route) and detection of local changes in movement complexity that are not recorded by classical methods. The fractal indicators used (Higuchi, Katz, Petrosyan, DFA dimensions) demonstrate high reproducibility and resistance to typical navigation data shortcomings. The proposed framework is primarily intended for onboard and post-voyage analysis, supporting navigational performance assessment, trajectory reconstruction, and detailed investigation of vessel motion dynamics based on the records from AIS and ECDIS.
- New
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010012
- Feb 11, 2026
- Digital
- Guangfan Sun + 2 more
Compared with conventional financing approaches, supply chain financing demonstrates superior adaptability in risk management, greater cost-effectiveness in financial control, and enhanced efficiency in approval processes, owing to its deep integration with industrial chains. This investigation explores the intrinsic relationship between digital innovation and corporate supply chain financing. To ensure the rigor and reliability of the research conclusions, we adopt an empirical research method based on the OLS econometric regression model to systematically examine the relationship between digital innovation and supply chain financing. Our findings reveal that digital innovation positively influences corporate operations and information disclosure quality, thereby facilitating supply chain financing acquisition. Specifically, digital innovation enhances both Tobin’s Q and information transparency, which consequently improves firms’ access to supply chain financing. Furthermore, we observe pronounced heterogeneity in digital innovation’s impact on supply chain financing accessibility, with more pronounced effects observed in state-owned enterprises, mature firms, and regions with less developed legal frameworks. From the perspective of theoretical contributions, this study enriches the application scenario of signal transmission theory. We verify that operational improvement driven by digital innovation can serve as an effective signal to alleviate information asymmetry in supply chain financing. Meanwhile, we supplement the research on information asymmetry theory by providing a digital solution to mitigate information frictions between supply chain partners. In terms of practical contributions, we provide actionable insights for firms. Specifically, our findings guide firms to leverage digital innovation to improve supply chain financing accessibility. Additionally, these findings offer references for supply chain stakeholders and relevant authorities to optimize financing support mechanisms.
- New
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010010
- Jan 28, 2026
- Digital
- Geetanjali Rathee + 4 more
This paper proposes an efficient and automated smart healthcare communication framework that integrates a two-level filtering scheme with a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA) to enhance the reliability, timeliness, and energy efficiency of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) systems. In the first stage, physiological signals collected from heterogeneous sensors (e.g., blood pressure, glucose level, ECG, patient movement, and ambient temperature) were pre-processed using an adaptive least-mean-square (LMS) filter to suppress noise and motion artifacts, thereby improving signal quality prior to analysis. In the second stage, a GA-based optimization engine selects optimal routing paths and transmission parameters by jointly considering end-to-end delay, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), energy consumption, and packet loss ratio (PLR). The two-level filtering strategy, i.e., LMS, ensures that only denoised and high-priority records are forwarded for more processing, enabling timely delivery for supporting the downstream clinical network by optimizing the communication. The proposed mechanism is evaluated via extensive simulations involving 30–100 devices and multiple generations and is benchmarked against two existing smart healthcare schemes. The results demonstrate that the integrated GA and filtering approach significantly reduces end-to-end delay by 10%, as well as communication latency and energy consumption, while improving the packet delivery ratio by approximately 15%, as well as throughput, SNR, and overall Quality of Service (QoS) by up to 98%. These findings indicate that the proposed framework provides a scalable and intelligent communication backbone for early disease detection, continuous monitoring, and timely intervention in smart healthcare environments.
- New
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010009
- Jan 28, 2026
- Digital
- Vasiliki Basdekidou + 1 more
The authors would like to make the following corrections to the published paper [...]
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010007
- Jan 19, 2026
- Digital
- Roberto A Pava-Díaz + 2 more
This article presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the indexed academic literature on the application of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain in the tourism industry. Using the bibliometrix library within the RStudio environment, key bibliometric indicators were examined in order to characterize the evolution, structure, and thematic focus of this emerging field of research. The systematic literature review, which adhered to PRISMA guidelines, involved retrieving publications from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. A curated dataset of 100 relevant documents was identified and analyzed in terms of annual scientific production, leading journals, influential authors, and highly cited publications. The results indicate that blockchain technology dominates the literature, with a strong emphasis on its potential to enhance trust, transparency, and efficiency in tourism-related processes. In particular, identity management, secure transactions, and disintermediation emerge as central research themes, reflecting blockchain’s capacity to support decentralized, immutable, and privacy-preserving interactions between tourists and service providers. Overall, the findings reveal a rapidly growing and increasingly structured body of knowledge, highlighting emerging research directions and technological challenges for future studies on DLT applications in tourism.
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010006
- Jan 19, 2026
- Digital
- Rawan Alamasi + 1 more
This study reviews the current applications of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in architectural design education using the PRISMA framework. It compares these applications across the different design stages, namely the pre-design, concept generation, design development, and design production, to identify the current state of evidence and conceptual discussions reported in the literature. The study also discusses the associated opportunities and challenges in this regard. The findings indicate that there is a growing interest in integrating GenAI into architectural design education, especially in the early design stages. However, one of the most significant gaps in this regard lies in the lack of empirical evidence on the long-term impacts of GenAI on students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Future research is needed to explore the integration of GenAI throughout the entire design process, including design development and refinement. There is also a need to incorporate the relevant ethical guidelines for AI-generated content into academic quality assurance systems and to strengthen institutional preparedness through targeted training and policy development.
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010005
- Jan 18, 2026
- Digital
- Nik Rollinson + 1 more
Android malware continues to evolve through obfuscation and polymorphism, posing challenges for both signature-based defenses and machine learning models trained on limited and imbalanced datasets. Synthetic data has been proposed as a remedy for scarcity, yet the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating effective malware data for detection tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we fine-tune GPT-4.1-mini to produce structured records for three malware families: BankBot, Locker/SLocker, and Airpush/StopSMS, using the KronoDroid dataset. After addressing generation inconsistencies with prompt engineering and post-processing, we evaluate multiple classifiers under three settings: training with real data only, real-plus-synthetic data, and synthetic data alone. Results show that real-only training achieves near-perfect detection, while augmentation with synthetic data preserves high performance with only minor degradations. In contrast, synthetic-only training produces mixed outcomes, with effectiveness varying across malware families and fine-tuning strategies. These findings suggest that LLM-generated tabular malware feature records can enhance scarce datasets without compromising detection accuracy, but remain insufficient as a standalone training source.
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010004
- Jan 14, 2026
- Digital
- Matthew Comb + 1 more
A universal approach to managing a person’s digital identity may be the single most important advancement to the Internet since its inception, promising the seamless flow of information, averting cybercrime, eliminating login credentials, and restoring privacy and trust through greater control of one’s identity online. However, this advancement brings significant risks, especially regarding personal privacy. It demands the meticulous development of digital identity infrastructure that balances robust data security measures with ethical handling of sensitive information, thereby safeguarding against misuse and unauthorised access. Currently, a consolidated vision for digital identity implementation remains unresolved, and aligning the different stakeholders’ motives and expectations is a challenging task. This article reviews and analyses the perspectives and expectations of four key stakeholder groups—government, business, academia, and consumers—regarding a digital identity ecosystem, aiming to increase trust in an eventual design framework. Using an online survey stratified across government, business, academia, and consumers, we identify areas of alignment and divergence regarding privacy, trust, usability, and governance expectations. We then encode these stakeholder expectations into a layered conceptual structure and illustrate its use as metadata for context-layered retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in digital identity scenarios.
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010003
- Dec 29, 2025
- Digital
- Istiaque Ahmed + 4 more
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) suffer from critical governance challenges, such as low voter participation, large token holders’ dominance, and inefficient proposal analysis by manual processes. We propose APOLLO (Autonomous Predictive On-Chain Learning Orchestrator), an AI-powered approach that automates the governance lifecycle in order to address these problems. The gemma-3-4b Large Language Model (LLM) in conjunction with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) powers APOLLO’s multi-agent system, which enhances contextual comprehension of proposals. The system enhances governance by merging real-time on-chain and off-chain data, ensuring adaptive decision-making. Automated proposal writing, logistic regression-based approval probability prediction, and real-time vote outcome analysis with contextual feature-based confidence scores are some of the major advancements. LLM is used to draft proposals and a feedback loop to enrich its knowledge base, reducing whale dominance and voter apathy with a transparent, bias-resistant system. This work demonstrates the revolutionary potential of AI in promoting decentralized governance, paving the way for more effective, inclusive, and dynamic DAO systems.
- Research Article
- 10.3390/digital6010002
- Dec 26, 2025
- Digital
- Klimentini Liatou + 1 more
Cross-modal and immersive technologies offer new opportunities for experiential learning in early childhood, yet few studies examine integrated systems that combine multimedia, mini-games, 3D exploration, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) within a unified environment. This article presents the design and implementation of the Solar System Experience (SSE), a cross-modal extended reality (XR) learning suite developed for preschool education and deployable on low-cost hardware. A dual-perspective evaluation captured both preschool teachers’ adoption intentions and preschool learners’ experiential responses. Fifty-four teachers completed an adapted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) questionnaire, while seventy-two students participated in structured sessions with all SSE components and responded to a 32-item experiential questionnaire. Results show that teachers held positive perceptions of cross-modal XR learning, with Subjective Norm emerging as the strongest predictor of Behavioral Intention. Students reported uniformly high engagement, with AR and the interactive eBook receiving the highest ratings and VR perceived as highly engaging yet accompanied by usability challenges. The findings demonstrate how cross-modal design can support experiential learning in preschool contexts and highlight technological, organizational, and pedagogical factors influencing educator adoption and children’s in situ experience. Implications for designing accessible XR systems for early childhood and directions for future research are discussed.