EAGER: SAI: Understanding and Bridging the Smart Technology Infrastructure Divide in Rural America

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement.

Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines.

SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.<br/><br/>The development of computer and information technology to support public and private services in many cities is nearly absent in rural communities.

This divide may further widen as so-called “smart” technologies continue to mature.

Developing smart rural communities requires advanced and networked technological infrastructure, digital applications, and social supporting infrastructure.

For rural communities to be smart, social infrastructure should be integral to the core functioning of technological infrastructure.

This project advances our understanding, and strengthening, of the interplay of technological and social infrastructures in rural America.

This project helps synergize and prioritize federal, state, and entrepreneurial investment, and develop policies to advance smart rural development.

The project allows healthcare providers, educators, technology developers, and policy makers to better serve rural citizens for healthcare and education during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. <br/><br/>Existing gaps in information and communication technologies and social infrastructures, without intervention, theoretically evolve into a new form of social inequality — a smart divide.

However, it is unclear what gaps exist in technological and social infrastructures in rural areas, what social infrastructure may be critical to support smart rural development, and how technological and social infrastructures can co-develop and co-balance to increase rural “smartness”.

The goal of this project is to fully understand and characterize social-technical ontology, contexts, and implications of low availability and access to smart technologies and to develop strategies for strengthening information and communication technologies and social infrastructures in rural communities.

The focus of this project is on the infrastructural and social support of telehealth and remote education using testbeds in two rural towns in southern Illinois with highly diverse populations and social inequalities.

The project develops a theoretical social-technical foundation to understand the availability of and accessibility to telehealth and online education, and characterizes the gaps and interplay of information and communications technology and social infrastructures using interviews and mail surveys.

It also seeks to identify and manage technological adoption niches for innovative solutions to increase rural accessibility to telehealth and online education.

The approaches, based on interdisciplinary research efforts and community engagement, are meant to enhance rural communities’ smart development.

The outcomes are expected to not only facilitate innovative strategies to bridge the smart divide but also theoretically inform the next-generation design of rural smart and connected communities.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.