Disposable Sensors in Diagnostics, Food, and Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

Disposable sensors are low-cost and easy-to-use sensing devices intended for short-term or rapid single-point measurements. The growing demand for fast, accessible, and reliable information in a vastly connected world makes disposable sensors increasingly important. The areas of application for such devices are numerous, ranging from pharmaceutical, agricultural, environmental, forensic, and food sciences to wearables and clinical diagnostics, especially in resource-limited settings. The capabilities of disposable sensors can extend beyond measuring traditional physical quantities (for example, temperature or pressure); they can provide critical chemical and biological information (chemo- and biosensors) that can be digitized and made available to users and centralized/decentralized facilities for data storage, remotely. These features could pave the way for new classes of low-cost systems for health, food, and environmental monitoring that can democratize sensing across the globe. Here, a brief insight into the materials and basics of sensors (methods of transduction, molecular recognition, and amplification) is provided followed by a comprehensive and critical overview of the disposable sensors currently used for medical diagnostics, food, and environmental analysis. Finally, views on how the field of disposable sensing devices will continue its evolution are discussed, including the future trends, challenges, and opportunities. ; C.D., R.B., and E.C.R. contributed equally to this work. This research was partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant Nos. UR 70/10-01, UR 70/12-01, and DI 2345/3-1; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under project CTQ2014- 58826-R; and Severo Ochoa program under Grant No. SEV-2013-0295. F.G. thanks the Wellcome Trust (207687/Z/17/Z), EPSRC (EP/R010242/1), and the Royal Society (RG160368) for their generous support. Note: The article numbers in refs. [46], [85], [206], [218] and [247] were corrected on July 23, 2019, after initial publication online. Figure 3 was also replaced to correct the y-axis unit for the potentiometry plot at the bottom middle ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion