# A Review of Internet of Things Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living Environments
## 3 State of the Art in IoT Technologies for Ambient Assistive Living
### Challenges in Application of IoT Technologies for AAL  
Although there are many scientific efforts in the IoT-based AAL related fields, there are still many challenges and issues, related with:  
* Intelligence. Most of the research papers talk about smart systems and environments, while the real intelligence means not only simple automation according to the pre-defined rules (smart behavior), but rather learning, adaptation, prediction and decision making based on the AI methods, according to the habits and behavior of the users of the intelligent environment as well as changes in that environment. Intelligent system for older people health monitoring (such as the one described in [56]), in order to provide highest level of comfort, energy savings or principally new services, needs to: constantly monitor the environment and its inhabitants, learn from theirbehavior, update its rules, predict the future changes and events, control environment and provide services for the users without intervention from the latter's. Current methods allow this partially, but still lack precision, fault tolerance, unobtrusiveness and stability.
* IoT security. Since there are no common widely accepted IoT security standards [57], many IoT producers propose to use their own proprietary security solutions, while many IoT security fields are still uncovered, e.g., home and industrial automation devices usually have no security technologies, completely relying on the central gateway security (if such is present). The recent world-wide cyber-attacks used IoT malwares and botnets as well, completely proving, how vulnerable IoT and its infrastructure is [58; 59]. From the security perspective, IoT is more threat bringing [60; 61] rather than security enabling technology. Although many of the potential advantages are still in the concept phase, it is necessary to mention them:
* Introduction of collaborative IoT networks [62] could lead to a more resistive (against cyberattacks) design;
* Evaluation of security requirements on the design phase, reviewing the currently existing process of IoT development to the embedded security approach [63] can significantly decrease the number of potential IoT related threats;
* End-to-end encryption [64] could be a method for insuring trust in communication between IoT entities;
* Lightweight security solutions [65; 66; 67] that could cover security needs and act on limited IoT resources.
* Integration. There is a huge variety of IoT devices, which cannot be interconnected at all or can be connected only at low level (usually network) demanding special integration solutions and additional development. As with IoT security, there is a lack of common integration and interoperability standards, especially for the dynamic discovery and plug-and-play support of IoT devices [68; 69].
* Unobtrusive sensing technologies and their precision. Though there are a lot of methods for indoor localization, posture detection, bio-parameters and environment monitoring, they still lack precision and require many obtrusive or even invasive sensors, which in turn is a very uncomfortable and expensive way to create the AAL environments [70].