Aim Research on the impact of digitalisation and transport mobilities’ on well-being and quality of life has been in the academic discussion in the last two decades. It is thought that digitalisation increasingly provides alternative connections for work, welfare services, and social contact. However, not much is known about how this transition has a differential impact on wellbeing for different groups of people. Thus, this research aims to explore how the physical mobilities (PM) and digital services (DS) impact on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) by evaluating individuals’ reflection on socio-economic and social capital status (SESC), the performance of infrastructure (PoI), and HRQoL.

Methods An online questionnaire survey was conducted for people from three Chinese cities (N= 649). The questionnaire incorporated 5 level Likert-scaled questions for evaluating independent variables of PM-related and PM-DS-related SESC and PoI. The questionnaire also included EQ-5D-5L to analyse HRQoL as an outcome. This research then conducted a set of linear regression in R Studio for all valid data and separately for different age groups and educational background groups.

Results SESC and PoI is positively correlated with the HRQoL (p < 0.001). When comparing the coefficients, we found that the PM is more reliant on the PoI for achieving better HRQoL than DS, which is in turn reliant on the SESC; The correlation between PoI and HRQoL demonstrated that the more educated individuals are more sensitive to PoI (3/6 of the groups p<0.001, others 0.001<p<0.05). The PoI has a greater impact on younger populations (p<0.001) and the regression was found to be non-significant (p>0.05) for the aged over 55 group; The correlations between SESC and HRQoL were only highly significant (p<0.001) for undergraduate educated group and the group aged 18 to 34.

Conclusion The results suggested that both physical mobilities and digital services are highly correlated with the HRQoL. This research reveals that compared to physical mobilities, digital services rely more on socio-economic resources and social relationships than infrastructure to achieve better HRQoL. Also we found that the younger populations and people who are more educated are more sensitive to the performance of infrastructure, and the people aged 18 – 34 and undergraduate educated populations are the most sensitive groups for the socio-economic and social capital status. Further research on this topic could focus on individuals’ intersecting contextual backgrounds.