Smart Technology is a quickly and constantly evolving concept; it has different applications that cover a wide range of areas, such as healthcare, education, business, agriculture, and manufacturing. An effective application of these technologies increases productivity and performance within complex systems. On one side, trends show a lack of appeal for rural environments as people prefer to move to cities, looking for better opportunities and lifestyles. On the other side, recent studies and reports show that the attractiveness of rural areas as places with opportunities is increasing. Sustainable solutions are needed to enhance development in the rural context, and technological innovation is expected to lead and support the stability for people and organizations in rural regions. While Smart City is progressively becoming a reality and a successful model for integrating Smart Technology into different aspects of everyday life, its effective application in a rural context according to a Sustainable Development approach is not yet completely defined. This study adopts comparative and categorial content analysis to address the different applications and the specific characteristics of rural regions, which often present significant peculiarities depending on the country and the context. The main goal is to investigate and discuss how the Smart City model may be adopted and effectively applied within rural contexts, looking at major gaps and challenges. Additionally, because of the complexity of the topic, we provide an overview of the current adoption of Smart Technology in the different applications in rural areas, including farming, education, business, healthcare, and governance. The study highlights the huge difficulties in rural life and the potentiality of Smart Technology to enhance their Sustainable Development, which is still challenging. While the holistic analysis clearly points out a gap, there is no specific strategic roadmap to re-use or adapt existing models, such as Smart City. The study does not address fine-grained indicators.

Despite rural regions cover a significant portion of the world's land, they remain overlooked entities within scholarly discourse as well as in a broader socio-economic context. However, their integration into sustainable development efforts is gaining relevance and should be considered as a strategic priority. This paper presents a research framework to identify determinants for Smart Technology adoption in rural regions. The main goal is to support organizations in rural areas to better understand and analyse the challenges with a scientific focus. It is expected to contribute to unlock new opportunities for innovative solutions, as well as to improve performance and enhance business sustainability in their unique context. The framework results from the combination and in-context interpretation of three different theories to define integrated strategic solutions: Diffusion of Innovation theory (DOI), Technology Organizations-Environment (TOE) framework, and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This approach ideally provides support to mixed methods to enable research in fact within real organizational contexts. Such a conceptual asset is expected to contribute in practice by facilitating (i) the formulation of theories as a response to open research issues, (ii) the development of appropriate integrated strategies, and (iii) the identification of major determinants to establish a consistent road map. The combination of chosen theories contributes to better investigating the causes of the research problem through a set of factors targeting the technology adoption in the rural context, providing a clear insight into solutions for decision-makers.

This paper describes a dataset for the Sustainable Development of remote and rural areas. Version 1.0 includes self-reported data, with a total of 212 valid responses collected in 2024 across different sectors (education, healthcare, and business) from people living in rural and remote areas in Saudi Arabia. The structured survey is understood to support research endeavors and policy making, looking at the peculiar characteristics of those regions. The 40 core questions, in addition to the detailed demographic questions, aim to capture different perspectives and perceptions on innovative and sustainable solutions. Overall, the dataset offers valuable strategic insights to be integrated with other sources of information, as well as the opportunity to incrementally generate extensive and diverse knowledge in the field. The major limitation is inherently related to the local context, as data comes from the most educated persons with access to digital resources. Additionally, the dataset may be considered as relatively small, and there is some gender imbalance due to cultural factors.