Healthcare

Healthcare is characterised by increasing expenditure, consumerisation, and chronic disease in ageing populations. Rural communities are further challenged by peripherality, lack of economies of scale and specific environmental health issues. Evolving health policy is predicated on community resilience, the concept that individuals and communities can take more responsibility for their health and service provision. Sensor systems, mobile devices, location based services, software models to support coordination and intelligent information management, and personalisation techniques could all enhance interactions with health and social care systems for young and older people in rural communities.

Accessibility & Mobilities

Sustainable transport systems are a key driver of economic, social and environmental well-being but the provision of adequate transport services in rural areas remains problematic. The advent of transport telematics has done much to raise the potential for innovative transport solutions such as more flexible transport services, where transport is organised on demand. A key challenge remaining is to embrace more convincingly the opportunities of the digital economy to provide more customer-focused solutions which maximise the available transport resource and are optimised to meet diverse and customised passenger demands. The implications of this would be far-reaching with impacts for quality of life, economic viability and the environment.

Enterprise & Culture

The creation of digital communities has profound implications for business, community and culture in rural areas. The potential disadvantages of these communities can be transformed by the imaginative use of new technologies so that small initiatives feed into broader economic sustainability. New technologies can help to develop small scale enterprise (business, social and artistic) in rural areas by encouraging networking and communication to link socially excluded social groups and geographically isolated populations to wider international communities. The implications of better information flows and service workflows at local, national and international levels for creating jobs through new business models is significant by linking producers and consumers in new and interesting ways (for example in food production, tourism or the arts).

Natural Resource Conservation

Natural resources provide society with benefits that enhance economic performance, improve quality of life and offer new opportunities. Yet our natural systems are under increasing stress from environmental change and much is managed unsustainably, as society imposes ever greater demands on our ecosystems and the services that sustain and improve human life. These services include the provision of food and fresh water, carbon storage, recreation, biodiversity and many more. Across the world there is a growing realisation of the need to develop new approaches to the conservation of natural resources, based on improved understanding of ecosystem services and the socio-economic systems that depend upon them. Digital technologies have the potential to provide rapid monitoring of the natural environment, to improve the flow of knowledge and to facilitate social learning and the development of collaborative management strategies and new markets.

Digital Technologies

The term ‘Technology Platform’ refers to some element of the under-pinning hardware/software infrastructure that is necessary to realise the Digital Economy vision. The investigation and development of individual Technology Platforms should not be considered as research activities distinct from dot.rural’s four research themes. Instead, the Technology Platforms are ‘threads’ running throughout, and across, all thematic areas. Moreover, such infrastructure will be informed, and utilised by, multiple dot.rural research projects.