Intelligence Complements from the Built Environment: A review of Smart Building Technologies for Cognitively Declined Occupants
It addresses the problem of reducing caregiver burdens and enhancing autonomy for cognitively declined individuals, but is incremental as it summarizes existing work and identifies gaps.
This paper reviews smart building technologies, such as IoT and AI, to assist cognitively declined occupants by monitoring behavior and providing in-home services, aiming to improve their quality of life and autonomy, but identifies five key research gaps including inadequate technological adoption for full independence.
Traditionally, caregivers, whether formal or informal, have taken the responsibility of providing assistance and care to patients with cognitive decline. Usually, both the caregiver and the patient are subjected to financial and emotional burdens, which impact the patient's life quality. To overcome this issue, Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) technologies have been adopted to replace the caregivers and complement patients' lack of intelligence. Technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled intelligent ubiquitous learning for smart buildings to monitor the cognitively declined occupants and provide in-home assistive services and solutions. This paper aims to summarize and evaluate the intelligence complements provided by smart buildings that can increase the cognitively declined occupants' quality of life and autonomy. Through a systematic literature review, the authors find that most of the existing contributions are towards identifying the occupants' behavior, and thus, to determine corresponding assistive services and solutions. Five key research gaps are identified, including the lack of adequate adoption of technological interventions to fully support the occupants' autonomy and independence. The authors also propose a conceptual framework to highlight the research gaps in smart building applications for cognitively declined occupants and to map the future research directions.