Recent years has seen the coming of age of gesture based assistive technologies which have dramatically enhanced the wellbeing of speech, hearing and physical disabled people. When associated with microcontrollers, machine learning and IoT platforms, gestures can be translated in real time to audio, text, or commands using these technologies to communicate and manage smart homes. This paper provides an overview of the current advances in gesture recognition systems with particular reference to smart gloves, cameras and IoT based systems. These are the changes in wearable flex sensors, gesture interpreting machine learning, and smart home device connectivity. Nevertheless, problems are still remained, for example, regarding environmental consciousness, high energy consumption, few degrees of freedom of freedom, and reliance on predefined databases. This review summarizes recent advancements and categorizes current issues and discusses potential new directions for further studies enhancing usability, availability, and effectiveness of gesture-based assistive technologies.