Intelligence Complements from the Built Environment: A Review of CPS-Enabled Smart Buildings for Cognitively Declined Occupants

Traditionally, caregivers, whether formal or informal, have taken the responsibility of providing assistance and care to the patients with cognitive decline. However, both the caregivers and the patients are subjected to experience financial and emotional burdens, which has impacted the patients’ life quality and quality of the provided care. To overcome the situation, Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) technologies have been sought for 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 review aims to evaluate and summarize the intelligence complements provided by smart buildings enabled with such capabilities to increase the cognitively declined occupants’ quality of life and autonomy. The review finds that most of the existing contributions are towards learning the occupants’ behavior to identify assistive services and solutions. The identified services are delivered through technological interventions or caregivers. Moreover, key research gaps are identified. The most important is the lack of adequate adoption of technological interventions to fully support the occupants’ autonomy and independence. Other identified gaps include challenges in usability and acceptability, ethical concerns, systems' comprehensiveness, and lacking human- in-the-loop. Lastly, a conceptual framework is proposed to address the gaps as the future research directions in the applications of smart buildings supporting cognitively declined occupants.