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The implementation of digital healthcare technologies—eHealth—is presented as a solution to increasing costs, demographic changes, and quality issues in rural healthcare. Employing the concept of affective atmospheres, this article uses interviews to explore the emotional aspects of digital healthcare among rural persons of advanced age. Our results suggest that participants were clearly influenced by an affective atmosphere that was deeply embedded in spatial imageries as well as in notions of old age. Strong feelings of resignation, necessity, low entitlement, and defiance tended to encourage participants’ wishes for local face-to-face healthcare to translate into viewing eHealth solutions as positive. This also meant that participants came to enact neoliberal identities of “active ageing”. In conclusion, the concept of affective atmospheres highlights how human subjects and digital materialities interact in the production of human emotional responses to digital healthcare technologies, and emphasises how the conditions and shared imageries of geographic space and age are active components in that process.

This research seeks to better understand how older people living in sparsely populated areas learn and then use eHealth applications in their everyday lives. The study was conducted in northern Sweden and Lapland in northern Finland, the most sparsely populated areas in these countries. The study focused on the use of following eHealth services: a medication-dispensing service, a virtual health room and a self-monitoring system. Research data were collected through semi-structured interviews and observations. The study included 19 participants, aged from 63 to 89 years. The following research questions guided the study: In what ways was the respondents’ learning and use of the eHealth service a social practice? How are such practices affected by cultural identities? The results show that digital self-care technologies can be very user friendly, easy to use, and sometimes, require very little learning effort from older users. However, the results also show that engaging in eHealth and learning how to use digital self-help services requires constant learning of different competences, not just digital but also competences that are medical and administrative. In addition, the use of eHealth required support from the respondents’ children, grandchildren, neighbors, and friends. Therefore, the digital self-care technologies contributed to a broader redistribution of responsibility from individual users and health and social care to informal support networks surrounding the respondents. Finally, the results indicated that respondents’ motives for learning and using the digital services often expressed cultural identities that affected such conceptions.

The use of healthcare apps for medical advice is becoming increasingly common. This paper explores apps that offer interaction with medical experts. Working from the supposition that digital technologies are intimately entangled in their cultural context, we argue that the apps do more than just neutrally mediate contacts and offer medical and psychological advice. The article addresses the cultural dimensions of healthcare apps and answers questions about the ways in which such apps contribute to forming changing notions of what “healthcare” and being a “patient” entail. Three popular Swedish apps and their marketing material is studied using a discursive interface analysis of the apps’ affordances. The results show that the apps significantly contribute to producing a marketable narrative about app health care that includes accessibility, security/safety and personalisation, and which is partly produced as an alternative to what is offered by Swedish public health care. The results further show that this narrative primarily represents and addresses users who are young, busy, urban consumers of care – partly contrasting policy expectations and hopes.