Emotion recognition system (ERS) is a technology that enables machines to recognize human's emotion. The machines use various modalities as input such as facial expression, voice intonation, gait, brain's electroencephalogram (EEG) and heart's electrocardiogram (ECG) to interpret human's current state of emotion. The advancement of learning algorithms supported the growth of this area. The ERS can be adopted in many application areas including smart homes. The incorporation of ERS for smart homes has the potential to help improving occupants' comfort and also quality of life. This paper presents a systematic review that focused on research of facial expression based ERS for smart homes application. The review is limited to works reported over the last decade, from year 2011 till 2021.