Background: To ensure a sustainable future in the maritime industry; new measures of employee well-being are needed. Digital health solutions have proven to possess great potential to ensure employee well-being regardless of location, with opportunities for a proactive instead of a reactive approach where health and safety issues can be avoided.  Research Problem: Despite the potential benefits of using digital health solutions, the acceptance and impact of such solutions remain unexplored in the maritime industry, which is essential for achieving improvements.   Purpose: This study aims to explore what influences the acceptance of digital health solutions for improving seafarer well-being to understand how the maritime industry accepts digital health solutions and, more importantly, the potential impact this acceptance has on seafarer well-being. Research Question: How does the acceptance of digital health solutions in the maritime industry impact the employee well-being of seafarers?  Methodology and Method: This is a qualitative and inductive study, with a relativist view of reality and a social constructionist view of knowledge, that aims to build new theories through semi-structured interviews and Gioia’s analysis method.  Conclusion: Our findings focus on what influences the acceptance of digital health solutions and how these solutions impact employee well-being. With the aid of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we find that there are levels of acceptance dependent on the nature of different influential factors. Furthermore, we discover that digital health solutions can influence physical, mental, and social well-being. From this, we develop a framework explaining the impact acceptance has on employee well-being. As a result, we illustrate that acceptance is a crucial aspect of improving employee well-being with digital health solutions.

The problem of insufficient healthcare is particularly noticeable in rural regions. Despite this, there is still little research on the digital transformation of healthcare in rural areas. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between the two research fields of "digital health” and “rural development” to find out the most significant challenges for rural areas when implementing and using digital health solutions. "Rural areas" in this work are referring to areas with low population density and small settlements in the industrialised EU countries. First of all, a “Digital Health Ecosystem” was developed based on a research review, which served as an overview of the most important factors and stakeholders regarding digital health in general. The “Digital Health Ecosystem” was used as part of the qualitative research method and interview guide to identify the challenges in transferring the overview to rural areas. An interview study was conducted with eight experts from the field of digital health with different backgrounds like technology, economics, social sciences, healthcare systems and smart village. The results show that digital health in general involves many barriers, which also apply to rural areas. The specific challenges for rural areas could be divided into four main categories: broadband and mobile networks; structural barriers; digital acceptance & competence; rural innovation. The findings reveal that the smart village concept and rural initiatives are still in their early stages and digital strategies and networks will have to spread more widely across the entire countries. Furthermore, services must be better targeted to the specific problems of rural communities. In particular, because the need for digital health solutions is very great in rural areas, where they can counteract problems like lack of healthcare providers and poor healthcare. In this context, all the general and specific challenges should not be considered separately, because the complexity of the ecosystem can only be understood by connecting all the different fields of action. / Problemet med otillräcklig sjukvård märks särskilt på landsbygden. Trots detta finns det fortfarande lite forskning om den digitala omvandlingen av sjukvården på landsbygden. Denna rapport syftar till att överbrygga klyftan mellan de två forskningsområdena "digital health" och "rural development" för att ta reda på de viktigaste utmaningarna för landsbygden när de implementerar och använder digitala hälsolösningar. "Landsbygdsområden" avser i detta arbete områden med låg befolkningstäthet och små bosättningar i de industrialiserade EU-länderna. Till att börja med byggdes ett ramverk, “Digital Health Ecosystem”, baserat på en forskningsöversikt. Detta ramverk fungerade som en översikt över de viktigaste faktorerna och intressenterna beträffande digital hälsa i allmänhet. ”Digital Health Ecosystem” användes som en del av den kvalitativa forskningsmetoden och intervjuguiden för att identifiera utmaningarna i överföringen av översikten till landsbygden. En intervjustudie genomfördes med åtta experter inom området digital hälsa med olika bakgrunder som teknik, ekonomi, samhällsvetenskap, hälsovårdssystem och smart by. Resultaten visar att det finns många hinder för digital hälsa i allmänhet, som också gäller för landsbygden. De specifika utmaningarna för landsbygden kan delas in i fyra huvudkategorier: bredbands- och mobilnät; strukturella hinder; digital acceptans & kompetens; landsbygdens innovation. Resultaten visar att det smarta landsbygder och andra typer av liknande initiativ i rurala områden fortfarande befinner sig i sina tidiga stadier och att digitala strategier och nätverk måste spridas mer över hela länderna. Dessutom måste tjänsterna riktas bättre mot de specifika problemen i landsbygdssamhällen. I synnerhet eftersom behovet av digitala sjukvårdslösningar är mycket stort på landsbygden, där de kan motverka problem som brist på vårdgivare och dålig sjukvård. I detta sammanhang bör alla allmänna och specifika utmaningar inte beaktas separat, eftersom ekosystemets komplexitet bara kan förstås genom att koppla samman alla olika handlingsfält.