Trends, benefits, risks, and challenges of IoT implementation in residential and commercial buildings

Residential and commercial buildings are undergoing a dramatic change, and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are shaping the future of these buildings. Researchers have recently utilized IoT in a variety of applications and settings to transfer conventional buildings into smart, efficient, and secure buildings. While functional IoT approaches have been developed, there is still a need for improvement in IoT applications and operations to understand the full potential of this technology. This improvement can properly be done by bridging the gaps of the current literature to provide a building block for future studies. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of research work on the existing technologies and applications of IoT in residential and commercial buildings. For residential buildings, studies are divided to three major categories of home automation, intelligent energy management systems, and healthcare facilities. For commercial buildings, the current literature is divided to four categories of office buildings, healthcare facilities, educational buildings, and restaurants and retail facilities. Based on the review of each category, the trends, current benefits and risks, and future challenges of the IoT implementation in the built environments are identified and discussed. In particular, integration of various IoT technologies with different capabilities, data storage and processing, and privacy and security risks are identified as the main challenges for IoT implementation. In addition, our results show that the commercial building sector has received more attention compared to the residential building sector. By providing the directions for future research opportunities, this paper benefits IoT developers and researchers to properly identify their work boundaries and define their contributions.