It is astonishing how fast humans have developed and which big role technology played in it. The invention of internet has simplified life in many ways: information is accessible at all times and people can directly communicate with people all over the world. How dependent humans have become on internet and modern technology comes apparent when an internet network crashes or electricity is cut off for a day.

Life has become very comfortable and work more efficient thanks to technology. Also many processes have been digitized, such as shopping, booking flights or even voting, which allow us to do a variety of things from home. Estonia is the leading country when it comes to digitalization in the public sector. They are one of the first to digitalize the whole voting process and the tax refund reform. Even parking tickets have been completely replaced by an online system accessible via your phone. 

There is no doubt that these advances made life more comfortable and easier. We can do more things in a shorter period of time and we do not even have to leave our homes for it. This reduces time spent on simple everyday-tasks or getting from A to B. In today's society, time is one of the most valuable resources and through digitalization it can be increased. This extra time gained because of technology can then be used to engage in activities that make us “happy”. 

However, it seems questionable whether it does really increase our life satisfaction. Life has become ever more fast paced in today's digitalized age. Life satisfaction and the pursuit of happiness are central themes to almost everyone's lives and thus very important to investigate. How society is functioning, changes rapidly due to the new technologies. Therefore, it is important to investigate its effects on people's life satisfaction. 

There are opposing views on the benefits of technology, raising the question whether digitalization really simplifies our lives and helps us reach our goal of a happy life.Therefore we want to investigate how satisfied Estonians are with the fast paced digitalization brought forward from their government. We will try to answer the following research question: how does Tallinn's fast paced digitalization and dependency on technology affect people’s perceived quality of life?

We expect that a two-sided answer. A positive side, in which the positive aspects of technological advances come forward. We expect people to have a raise in their quality of life, because of how easy it is to stay connected, wherever you are. Moreover, the ease of technology should allow us to have more time to spent on “fun” activities. However, there will also be a negative side, which shows all the negative sides of technology. People will have a decrease in quality of life due to things like smartphone addiction, more stress and sleeping problems. We expect that always being connected means a lot of stress for most people. Moreover, more older people will have the feeling that they are less independent than before. 

Since we are interested in Estonians opinion about digitalization and their life satisfaction, we want to engage with the local people and use interviews to capture their opinions and viewpoints. To be able to do this, we will search for some crowded places in Estonia. We will use semi-structured interviews in which we assess people’s (dis)satisfactions. The answers to the questions will be coded afterwards. This will make it easier to compare the results and draw a conclusion. It is important to look for people of different ages, because we can imagine that this digitalized world is experienced differently by the elderly in comparison to the youth. Therefore it will be interesting to compare the results of these distinct groups. 

On top of the interviews, we would like to visit some places. First, we will try to arrange a visit to Tehnopol. This is the Tallinn Science Park in which more than 200 technology based companies are located. We are hoping to visit one (or more) of these companies to get an idea of the way that they look at the digitalization and the effect that it has on society. More specifically, we would like to meet with stakeholders from the Digital Health Cluster here that include startups and large companies involved in innovations in the healthcare sector. Since health is an important part of lifestyle, we would like to include this as a key aspect in our research. Already existing examples of such innovations include ePrescriptions and opening up the national electronic health to private companies to ease the development of new services for citizens. We are not only interested in the benefits and the impact associated with such innovations but also whether (and how) the difficult aspects including privacy have been dealt with.