# A Review of Internet of Things Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living Environments
## 3 State of the Art in IoT Technologies for Ambient Assistive Living  
### IoT Technologies for Ambient Assistive Living  
The IoT technologies for AAL domain include research areas, specific to IoT, but not limited to: smart homes and smart environments; ambient assisted living (AAL); agent-based pervasive computing and decision-making methods; and IoT sensing technologies (wireless sensor networks, smart sensors, gateways, etc.).  
There are many scientific publications in the abovementioned fields, presenting various state-of-the-art technologies, methods and systems, which are intended to create smart environments at homes or cities, providing various services and automation features, to improve the life, work and leisure conditions of the inhabitants of those spaces. Many papers propose various IoT and smart systems' architectures [36], which connect intelligent personal assistants, cloud computing and smart environment paradigms, concentrating on the creation of connected smart living environments for the older people or disabled people. As presented in [37; 38; 39; 40], the AAL research area includes many subtopics like user-oriented services, adaptive user interfaces, data collection, wearables, human activity recognition and indoor localization, behavior monitoring, etc. On the other hand, the review [41] shows that until now the AAL domain misses the existing IoT ecosystems.  
A very important part of the cognitive methods and solutions is related to smart homes, smart environments and smart services, based on IoT. Usually this includes home/environment appliances control, as in [42; 43], or the modeling and creation of smart buildings [44]. In order to provide personalized services and control automation, there are several methods proposed which allow us to detect humans in IoT environments as presented in [45], where the Bluetooth Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is used as a communication platform for human identification using unobtrusive sensors. The control and adjustment of such smart AAL environments are usually based on the mobile terminals and wearable IoT devices as in [46]. Some researchers are even trying to employ (though still not very successfully) emotion recognition for the smart home and AAL applications [47].  
A very important aspect of smart living related research area is IoT security. This emerging area is very important, since many IoT devices and services have only basic security or does not have it at all. Although, the researchers are trying to improve situation proposing various methods and countermeasures (as seen in [48; 49]), the IoT security standards are still under development and various companies offer their own proprietary solutions, which do not cover all security fields.  
As mentioned above, the concept of cognitive technologies for smart environments goes far beyond the home environment and covers smart cities and public IoT services. For example, IoT has started to be used for entertainment and education such as the intelligent cultural spaces presented in [50] or the IoT-aware services for smart museums [51], based on an indoor localization method (using Bluetooth), wearable devices and the users' mobile devices to display and share cultural contents in the cloud. Smart parking system [52], blind navigation system [53], dangerous situations detection system [54] or activity prediction system for mobile services [55] are also good examples of the IoT AAL applications in the context of smart cities and connected smart environments.