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Impact of Assistive Technologies in Addressing Challenges in Indoor Farming: A Review

World population is increasing at an alarming rate reaching to 7.7 billion, raising the demands of food exponentially. Conventional farming yields are not able to handle the global food demands and causes issues associated with environment, health and quality. In order to meet the demand and supply ratio, the agriculture practices adopted pose serious issues that are essential to address. These challenges include shortage of fertile soil and water, usage of artificial fertilizers and pesticides influencing quality of yield, complications in farming methods demanding skilled farmers, and unawareness about the impact of agriculture on society and economy. To overcome these challenges indoor farming has gained a lot of attention seeking for research in recent times. In this paper, research is carried out to investigate and review the challenges in farming methods from natural, societal, scientific and socio-economic perspective. Though, indoor farming is evolved as extended farming solution to conventional farming, maintaining and managing indoor farms has become tedious for traditional farmer. Technological interventions thus considered as an add-on support for providing ease of use in handling indoor farming issues. The paper explores usage of various conventional and advanced technologies to determine feasibility of their application in ecological indoor farming systems. Various solutions that are experimented on numerous platforms in different countries are detailed to validate the feasibility of the solution. Also, a review on assistive technologies like Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence etc, which have revolutionized indoor farming is provided. The contribution of this paper is to evaluate feasible assistive technologies that are suitable for real-time. The research concludes with a summary on quantifying the impact of assistive technologies in contribution towards indoor farming. The paper is concluded with key findings from challenges that can be addressed with the usage of most feasible assistive technology. The finding can assist a typical farmer to develop their own indoor farming systems and maintain effectively.