Fast Facts and Concepts Digital Legacy in Palliative Care #528.

The need for palliative care is increasing, and it is essential to consider emerging technologies that have the potential to enhance care for palliative patients and their carers. The creation of online content and digital media stored on devices is often described as a digital legacy. There is limited knowledge about how digital legacy is included in planning for the end of life. To conduct a scoping review of the literature to describe healthcare professionals, patients receiving palliative care, caregivers and bereaved people's experience of including digital legacy in planning for the end of life. A scoping review of the literature was carried out. The question was formulated using the Population, Exposure, Outcome format as follows: 'What is known from the existing literature about healthcare professionals, patients receiving palliative care, caregivers, and bereaved people's experience of including digital legacy in planning for the end-of-life?' 506 records were screened and 11 were included in the review. A number of examples of the use of digital legacy were identified. Themes identified from the literature include digital legacy showing the authentic person, digital legacy evoking emotion, digital legacy to maintain a connection and preparing digital legacy. People receiving palliative care use digital legacy to make memories and capture the essence of their character, often finding time for reflection and creating a sense of empowerment. A person's digital legacy could be discussed with healthcare professionals and others who are important to support in planning for the end of life.

Advances in generative AI have given rise to a growing industry centred on interactive representations of deceased individuals. Within this emerging "digital afterlife industry", interactive deadbots (IDBs) are presented as hyper-realistic avatars that use a person's likeness, voice, and personal data to simulate conversational interactions with them. Rapidly moving from a niche experiment to a mainstream phenomenon, IDBs are poised to reshape the ethical, social, legal, and governance landscapes surrounding death, mourning, and digital legacy. This paper examines the disruptive nature of IDB technology through a multidisciplinary lens, using the concept of indeterminacy as its guiding analytical framework and a novel way to conceptualise the unstable field. Rather than advancing a unified understanding of indeterminacy, we introduce a structured analytical map and provisional taxonomy that distinguishes technological, social, philosophical, legal, and regulatory manifestations of indeterminacy in IDBs. By offering a tentative and necessarily selective map of this fluid and nascent field, we explore how indeterminacy and IDBs intersect. The paper examines how IDBs amplify existing forms of indeterminacy and how indeterminacy itself shapes the development and use of these systems across five domains: technological, social, philosophical, legal, and regulatory.

Family firms often face the challenge of embracing digital transformation while preserving the values, identity, and legacy that have shaped the business over generations. Although research on this topic has expanded considerably, existing findings remain fragmented across different theoretical perspectives. This paper addresses that gap by developing the Digital–Legacy Balance Framework, which integrates socioemotional wealth (SEW), stewardship governance, and dynamic capabilities (DCs) to explain how family firms build digital resilience. Following the PRISMA protocol, a systematic review of 87 peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025 was conducted using articles from Scopus, Web of Science, and Emerald Insight. The findings reveal four recurring patterns in family-firm digital transformation: balancing legacy preservation with change, adopting stewardship-based digital governance, managing generational shifts in mindset, and selectively embracing innovation to protect socioemotional wealth. These patterns do not operate independently; rather, they reinforce one another through a cyclical process in which successful digital initiatives strengthen family identity and support future adaptation. The study suggests that digital transformation in family firms should not be assessed solely through implementation speed or short-term financial outcomes, but through digital resilience the ability to modernize while maintaining continuity, trust, and long-term family values. Although the framework is based on secondary data, it provides a foundation for future empirical research and offers practical insights for family-business leaders seeking to balance technological progress with the preservation of their heritage. Overall, the paper presents digital transformation as a process of renewal that enables family firms to remain competitive without losing the qualities that make them unique.

Background: The handling of bodies after death has increasingly become a controversial topic in European legal discourse, not least at the crossroads of human dignity, data protection, and forensic justice. Although human dignity is enshrined as one of the fundamental principles offered for protection under EU law, the exploration of such a principle and its extension to post-mortem interests is patchy and divergent within different Member States. The article (i) assesses whether, in the European legal framework, human dignity has justiciable implications beyond death; and (ii) examines how the EU might reconcile growing expectations regarding post-mortem rights in the context of digitalised warfare, big data and hybrid conflicts. To illustrate these challenges in practice, the analysis incorporates Ukraine as a contextual case study, where the Russia–Ukraine armed conflict has exposed large-scale casualties, the digital dissemination of images of deceased persons, and the limitations of existing European protection mechanisms. Methods: The paper presents a comparative legal analysis of EU law, specific legislation in selected Member States, and limitations in international human rights norms with a focus on the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. It also builds on interdisciplinary research, bringing together legal doctrine, bioethics, and the study of digital governance. The methodology is predominantly doctrinal and analytical, supported with cases illustrating different national approaches to the protection of posthumous dignity and rights. Results and Conclusions: The article highlights that EU law lacks a systematised framework for post-mortem dignity, thus leaving Member States free to regulate in a fragmented and sometimes contradictory manner. National solutions vary considerably, from strong protection of post-mortem personality rights with specific remedies (Germany, France) to the lack of any existing legal remedy (United Kingdom). This continuing digital legacy in contemporary wars—illustrated by the case of Ukraine, where mass graves and images of deceased persons distributed online have raised urgent concerns—points to the limitations of current mechanisms, including the GDPR and the Digital Services Act. These trends indicate that the EU could adopt deeper integration, integrating non-binding legislative and judicial cooperation instruments, in line with prevailing international standards, with a view to reducing an identified gap between the formal recognition of human dignity and its effective post-mortem protection.

This study explores factors shaping adoption of generative AI–driven Digital Immortality (DI), comparing Digital Legacy Givers (DLGs)—who create posthumous avatars—and Digital Legacy Receivers (DLRs)—who interact with them. Analyzing 305 DLG and 307 DLR surveys plus 18 interviews, it finds DLGs are driven by Presence Extension Needs (PEN) but hindered by Data Snooping Concerns (DSC), reflecting desires for identity continuity and privacy fears. Conversely, DLRs seek Simulated Intimacy Needs (SIN) yet worry about Relationship Desecration Concerns (RDC), valuing emotional closeness while fearing inauthenticity. The study proposes a “Desire–Concern–Individual (D-C-I)” framework, revealing DLGs follow an individual-centered logic (self-perpetuation), while DLRs adopt a socially centered one (relational preservation). It also redefines “ritual” to include everyday human–AI affective interactions, extending beyond traditional mourning practices.

Digital legacy planning refers to the intentional organization and management of digital assets and digital identity in anticipation of incapacity or death. Despite the growing volume and personal significance of digital materials, engagement in digital legacy planning remains limited, particularly among older adults. This article presents a conceptual and methodological foundation for a proposed quantitative study examining factors that shape older adults’ behavioral intention to engage in digital legacy planning, conceptualized as a preventive innovation and a socially embedded process situated within postdigital adult life. Guided by Diffusion of Innovations theory, Moore and Benbasat’s Perceived Characteristics of Innovation framework, and insights from adult development and intergenerational learning, the paper outlines a cross-sectional survey design. The proposed study introduces a partially standardized collaborative prototype of digital legacy planning through a brief informational video to anchor participants’ understanding of the innovation and involves an online questionnaire administered to adults aged 60 and older residing in an age-restricted community in central Texas. The instrument adapts validated measures of perceived relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability, and extends the framework by incorporating two social influence constructs: explicit encouragement and perceived social value. Behavioral intention to engage in digital legacy planning is specified as the dependent variable, with planned analyses including descriptive statistics, reliability assessment, and multiple linear regression. The proposed design is intended to clarify whether digital legacy planning functions as a preventive innovation among older adults and to identify key perceptual and relational factors shaping intention. By articulating a theoretically grounded and educationally informed study design, the paper aims to inform future empirical research and the development of adult education and communication interventions that support socially meaningful digital legacy planning.

<p>Azeas and the Problem of Digital Continuity: Five AI-Generated Philosophical Dialogues on Memory, Recursion, and Selfhood</p>

Digital legacy indicates the bundle of accounts, data and digital assets that continue to exist after a natural person’s death. This paper addresses three questions: what policy-ready definition and taxonomy of “digital legacy” best guide governance; how comparative regimes perform in practice; and what China-specific pathway under the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (CCPRC) can effectuate user intent, protect post-mortem dignity and third-party privacy, and enable lawful succession at scale. Using a comparative doctrinal and policy-analysis approach, the study triangulates primary legal sources (statutes, regulations, case law), official platform documentation and 2022-2025 peer-reviewed scholarship. It first consolidates a functional taxonomy spanning direct-value digital assets, derivative-value accounts and sentimental/cultural records. It then synthesizes international experience: the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) authority hierarchy in the United States; the EU’s exclusion of deceased persons in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) paired with Member-State rules (e.g., France’s post-mortem directives); Germany’s inheritable-contract doctrine; evolving industry guidance; and heterogeneous platform tooling (designation, memorialization, export and scoped access). Building on these findings, the paper proposes a China roadmap that clarifies concepts and authority, mandates privacy-preserving, auditable disclosure via standardized evidence packages and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and scales pre-death designations through usable defaults. The contribution is a layered governance model—statutory baselines, standards, platform implementation and user planning—that is legally coherent, operationally feasible and culturally sensitive.

This study raises awareness about people's social media habits, sharing purposes, digital identity, and post-mortem digital legacy management concepts. In this context, digital legacy awareness in new media was analyzed using a qualitative method through in-depth interviews with participants who use new media and live in Turkey. Data obtained from semi-structured interviews with thirty-five participants were evaluated using descriptive analysis methods. The findings show that participants use social media primarily for information gathering, archiving, and communication purposes, and prefer sharing temporary content (story) over permanent posts. It is emphasized that social media does not reflect reality, affects individual psychology, and that privacy boundaries are determined by personal values. The majority of participants are not aware of the concept of digital heritage and prefer to have their accounts closed after death. This study is one of the pioneering qualitative research studies examining the relationship between digital heritage and social media use in the field of communication in Turkey. In this context, it contributes to the discipline of communication on the topics of digital heritage, digital identity, privacy, and digital mortality; and highlights the need to address the phenomenon of digital heritage in the context of social awareness in Turkey.

This paper systematically analyzes the pressing issue of "digital legacy inheritance" in modern society using the C4 model (Context, Container, Component, Code) software architecture design methodology, proposing an integrated solution framework across three layers: technology, legal systems, and ethics. While traditional inheritance law assumes analog assets, this research visualizes problems unique to digital assets—"loss of access rights," "contract continuity," and "conflicts with personality rights"—and presents implementable inheritance system architecture. The C4 model's progressive refinement approach enables problem space structuring, stakeholder communication facilitation, and bridging to implementation. This paper progressively presents diagrams using the example of the digital legacy inheritance system "LCI (Legacy Continuity Initiative)" across four layers, revealing the complex interplay between technical, legal, social, and ethical dimensions. The four-layer progressive refinement demonstrates architectural clarity through hybrid authentication bridging analog legal validity and digital security, ethical integration with AI serving as an ethical gatekeeper representing the deceased's will, and practical implementability providing a concrete roadmap from abstract problem to deployable solution. Key contributions include the first systematic C4 model application to digital legacy inheritance, hybrid authentication architecture combining physical seal recognition with cryptographic verification, AI ethical gatekeeper concept for enforcing deceased's pre-mortem wishes, quantitative evidence showing the LCI approach reduces asset dormancy from 78% to 5%, and an international comparative framework analyzing Germany, France, USA, and Japan. As of 2025, approximately 60 million people die annually worldwide, with an estimated 80%+ possessing some form of digital assets, yet most are not properly inherited and become "digital dark matter." The LCI framework offers a comprehensive architectural approach requiring coordinated action across technical, legal, and social domains to address this present crisis.

The objective of the study is to assess training needs and the status of digital legacy and advanced care planning amongst participants. Following the World Health Assembly resolution, the Government of India launched National Programme for Palliative Care (NPPC) for a continuum of physical, psychosocial, and spiritual care of those suffering from life-threatening and life-limiting illnesses and their caregivers. As a process of implementation, capacity building with a nationwide cascade model training has been started with medical officers (M.O.s) at the district levels. A cross-sectional study was conducted from February to April 2024 amongst 260 M.O.s of four randomly selected districts of West Bengal. A semi-structured and validated questionnaire containing single-answer multiple-choice questions with a maximum score of 30 was used for pre- and post-training assessment. Digital death survey 2024 (open) was used for assessing digital legacy and end-of-life care planning. Paired t-test showed a significant difference (P < 0.05) in mean scores of pre- and post-training. The univariate general linear model showed 69% of unmet training need. 202 (77.7%), 241 (92.7%), 217 (83.5%), and 258 (99.2%) expressed their unfamiliarity with digital legacy, assets, death and immortality, respectively. None was found to document wishes for end-of-life medical and/or social care in advance or an anticipatory care plan. Periodic training of M.O.s is an exigency for smooth running of NPPC and integration of palliative care in primary health care.

Introduction: This literature review uses thematic analysis to identify common themes and topics in recent literature on the perceptions, attitudes, and motivations towards parents’ sharenting behavior. Objective: This study investigates perspectives on sharenting—the practice of parents posting content about their children on social media—and the rationale behind this behavior. As digital platforms become more integrated into family life, understanding the motives for sharing is critical for assessing their social, ethical, and developmental consequences. Methods: Articles were selected through a literature search. We eliminated articles that included sharenting, sharenting practices in Malaysia, impression management and sharenting, and reinforcement theory and sharenting. 41 articles were chosen and reviewed to identify the main topics of discussion. Findings: This study identifies major motives for sharing, as revealed through qualitative interviews and surveys with parents and social media users, including a need for social connection, community support, and documenting parenting milestones. The findings reflect a variety of viewpoints on the practice, with some seeing sharing as a way to celebrate parenting and develop relationships. In contrast, others are concerned about privacy and the digital legacy left for children. Conclusion: By analyzing these perspectives, the study contributes to the broader discussion of digital parenting practices and sheds light on the balance between sharing and privacy in the digital era. This study emphasizes the importance of raising parental awareness and providing help as they navigate the difficulties of social media sharing. Recommendation: These results serve as a reference for future child psychology and mental health research. Thus, it is recommended that parental sharenting behavior be further explored, and a suitable legal framework should be established in Malaysia to govern and manage this issue before violations related to sharenting, such as digital kidnapping and cyberbullying, become difficult to address in the Malaysian context.

In this paper, we discuss views on trust around custodianship and curation of non-photographic digital legacies. Physical photographs have long been the artefact of choice for storytelling and leaving a legacy for those that come after. Digital photographs, on the other hand, present curation challenges in terms of the size and complexity of the user-generated libraries. Further, their highly personal nature can lead to concerns over possible embarrassing content, which makes custodianship difficult. In a mixed method research project, five non-photographic digital asset types emerged as being significant in the daily lives of participants, namely music, books, programming, gaming and note-taking. We compared them to participants’ views of digital photographs as a legacy. We found that journaling, music and books read were on par with photographs for emotional attachment and providing a sense of self, in some circumstances. Indeed, some non-photo assets, such as music playlists and reading lists were cited as being less context specific and more able to communicate sense of self than photographs. Collections of non-photographic assets were typically much smaller than collections of photographs and were stored in more organised and centralised libraries, which makes curation easier. We also examined the intent to leave assets as legacy and the desire to curate them before leaving them. Our research also revealed lack of defined custodianship for digital legacy data being left behind. Participants were pre-occupied with ultimate target audiences that might be interested in the legacy, as opposed to who would be trusted to look after and administer the legacy. In future work, we plan to conduct a series of workshops on trust and custodianship to explore how a cohort of everyday users might navigate and show confidence in leaving a curated digital legacy.

Grounded in Terror Management Theory (TMT), this theoretical paper explores how digital technologies reshape pathways to symbolic immortality. Digital environments both offer new routes—through self-esteem, cultural worldviews, close relationships, and legacy tools—and introduce vulnerabilities such as fragmented meaning, fragile validation, and diminished control. A classification framework based on interactivity and volition is proposed to differentiate forms of digital legacy and immortality. Through this lens, the paper theorizes how digital defenses may vary in symbolic and psychological function when facing death anxiety. Building on this foundation, the paper conceptualizes the immortality trap, a paradox where the preservation of digital presence undermines the transmission of existential meaning. It ultimately argues that symbolic immortality in the digital age cannot rely on data preservation alone; rather, it must involve the intentional transmission of values and meaning to sustain existential coherence and cultural continuity.

The development of technology communication and information has produce the phenomenon of digital legacy, which is a person's digital footprint that remains stored and persists after they pass away.This digital legacy not only reflects a person's identity and personal life but also stores sensitive and private data.In the perspective of human rights, the right to privacy is a base right that must be protected, including personal data post-mortem. However, the legal system in Indonesia has not explicitly regulated the protection of digital legacy, resulting in a legal vacuum that potentially violates the right to privacy.This research uses a normative method with a legislative approach and a case approach.The study results show that the absence of national legal norms specifically regulating digital legacy causes society to depend on the internal policies of foreign digital platforms, which do not guarantee justice and human rights protection. National regulations are needed that specifically govern the protection of personal data post-mortem as a form of respect for human privacy and dignity, as well as a tangible manifestation of the state's responsibility to guarantee the human rights of its citizens in the digital era.

This paper explores the Onassis Foundation's transformative impact on C.P. Cavafy's legacy by bridging traditional literary heritage with contemporary digital culture. Through strategic digitization, global events, and social media campaigns, the Foundation has expanded Cavafy's reach, reframing him as both a cultural asset and a networked figure for contemporary audiences. This study examines how an institutional approach shapes perceptions of Cavafy's work, balancing authenticity with celebrity-making, and considers the implications for Modern Greek literature's visibility on the global stage.

This paper explores how grief is intertwined within artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital areas. It examines concepts such as the griefbot, an AI used to provide communication between the deceased and the bereaved, digital online memorial spaces to commemorate those who have passed, and digital immortality. While griefbots provide comfort to those who have lost a loved one, questions surrounding ethics of use, such as obtaining the consent of the deceased, using the deceased’s data, and respecting their privacy, remain relevant. The digital afterlife industry, which includes online memorials, puts into question several societal challenges. These chal­lenges can lead to debates over who “deserves” the most to have access data and digital spaces. Capitalism and digital immortality may reveal power dynamics with the deceased. For instance, business leaders and public figures may leave behind a digital legacy to continue to wield au­thority beyond the life of their physical bodies. As societies continue to merge aspects of human lives (and deaths) into the digital world, we must address issues of consent, privacy, and equita­ble access. Grieving and remembrance must not be lost in the digital age.

It is quite challenging to properly address the issues of digital assets and online identities by conventional estate rules in the era of digital technologies. Rising social media platforms, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other virtual assets have made digital legacy complex. Current research highlights the constraints of existing estate laws for the administration of digital assets after death and the legal obstacles resulting from digital platform contractual limitations. The key challenges identified are assets classification, protection of privacy rights, and enforcement of policies on a wider scale. By comparing the global legal approaches and evolving trends in digital inheritance, a comprehensive framework including digital assets into estate planning has been proposed. A balanced legal framework ensuring fair distribution, protecting heirs' rights and building trust in the digital economy is the solution.

Inheritance systems worldwide are undergoing a paradigm shift evolving from manually administered processes to technologically enabled platforms for managing both tangible and digital assets. Yet, the scholarly understanding of how technologies ranging from information systems to blockchain have transformed inheritance management remains underexplored and fragmented. This study aims to trace the evolution of inheritance systems from 2010 to 2025, with a particular focus on the digitalization of inheritance management, emerging technologies and governance models. Using a bibliometric approach, 229 documents were initially retrieved from the Scopus database. After removing irrelevant records, a refined dataset of 81 publications was analyzed using Excel and VOSviewer. The analysis included performance metrics (e.g., publication growth, citation trends, and country output) and science mapping (keyword co-occurrence and clustering). Findings reveal a significant rise in publications post-2020, coinciding with increased attention to digital assets, data privacy laws (e.g., GDPR) and emerging technologies such as blockchain. The most active contributors were from the United States, China and the United Kingdom. Highly cited articles discuss themes such as digital legacy, legal frameworks, asset authentication and ethical considerations. Thematic clustering revealed four research domains: digital legacy and estate transition, digital transformation and trust, digital asset structuring and fraud prevention in social media inheritance. This study contributes a comprehensive overview of the field’s conceptual landscape by highlighting the uneven yet accelerating integration of digital tools in inheritance systems. It also underscores the urgent need for inclusive, interdisciplinary frameworks that accommodate diverse legal, cultural and technological contexts for future inheritance governance.