Advanced Sensor Research最新文献

In recent years, wearable technology has transcended its initial emphasis on fitness and lifestyle applications, expanding its horizons to encompass a critical role in healthcare and environmental monitoring. This remarkable evolution has been propelled by the advancement of wearable chemical sensors, a burgeoning field that has piqued the interest of both the scientific community and the general public. Wearable chemical sensors are distinct in their unparalleled ability to offer direct and precise insights into our health and surroundings. This trait is crucial in providing real-time insights into various personalised healthcare, environmental safety, and ubiquity of Internet of Things (IoT) that cannot be matched by other sensor types. For instance, these sensors can identify biomarkers in sweat or monitor air quality, yielding critical information that can lead to early disease detection or the identification of environmental risks.

The interdisciplinary nature of the wearable chemical sensors, which integrates materials science, chemistry, electronics, and data analytics, situates them at the vanguard of technological innovation. Unlike other sensors that may have limited scope, wearable chemical sensors can offer comprehensive health monitoring by tracking changes in body chemistry, which may be indicative of various health conditions. This renders them invaluable tools in the quest for personalized medicine. In addition, in the sphere of environmental monitoring, wearable chemical sensors surpass other sensor types in their ability to deliver real-time, localized information about pollutants or harmful substances in the air. This degree of specificity and immediacy in identifying environmental changes is a substantial advantage over other sensor types that may only provide broader, less precise information. Despite the substantial strides made in the field of wearable chemical sensors, the sector faces several challenges. Among these are the miniaturization of sensor components, the enhancement of their sensitivity and selectivity, ensuring durability and reliability in diverse environmental conditions, and addressing data privacy and security concerns. Furthermore, integrating these sensors into wearable devices that are user-friendly and visually appealing remains a critical area of focus.

The latest issue of Advanced Sensors Research features a special focus on “Wearable Chemical Sensors,” presenting novel studies in this dynamic and rapidly evolving field. An opening article [adsr.202300014] delves into the creation of a Sb-doped SnO₂ nanosphere composite polypyrrole nanohybrid, showcasing its exceptional sensitivity in detecting ammonia. This detailed exploration of nanomaterial properties provides a foundation for understanding the complex interplay between doping ratios and composite structures, which enhances sensor performance in environmental and industrial settings. Expanding on this foundational

Electrochemical biosensing represents a highly effective technology for detecting disease biomarkers given its high sensitivity, low and clinically relevant limit of detection, and cost effectiveness. However, in complex media such as urine, blood, sweat or saliva, biosensing performance can be significantly impacted by electrode biofouling by proteins, cells, lipids, and other matrix components. Such biofouling leads to reduced signal from the target analyte coupled with an elevated background signal, resulting in poor signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), reduced sensitivity, and lower specificity. This comprehensive review describes the design of anti-fouling polymers and peptides as a potential solution to prevent or suppress electrochemical biosensor fouling. Various anti-fouling polymers and peptides developed for improved biosensing in complex media are summarized in the context of their mechanism(s) of anti-fouling, methods of deposition, and practical applications. Recent advances and persistent challenges in the field are also reviewed to provide perspectives on new directions toward enhancing anti-fouling in electrochemical biosensors.

High-performance organic phototransistors (OPTs) have attracted considerable attention owing to their high photoresponse and low-cost solution-processing manufacturing. To meet the increasing demand for integrated optoelectronic circuits, organic single-crystalline micro-/nanowire arrays for OPTs construction are prominently anticipated. However, the manufacturing and patterning of organic single-crystalline arrays have hit a bottleneck due to the uncontrollable dewetting dynamics. In this work, a capillary-bridge lithography strategy is proposed to guide ordered nucleation and unidirectional dewetting of microfluid, thus enabling the large-scale preparation of highly aligned organic single-crystalline microwire arrays. Taking advantage of efficient carrier transport, a competitive average field-effect hole mobility (μ) of 6.64 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹ is obtained, and the high-throughput one-dimensional (1D) arrays based OPTs also exhibit excellent optoelectrical performance with photosensitivity (P) of 1.36 × 10⁶, responsivity (R) of 3.18 × 10⁴ A W⁻¹, and specific detectivity (D^*) of 9.22 × 10¹⁴ Jones. This work provides a guide for the designing and patterning of high-throughput OPTs toward multifunctional integrated optoelectronics.

Methods to encode digital data items as strands of synthetic DNA followed by selective data retrieval have been demonstrated. However, these initially bio-oriented processes remain slow and not optimized. DNA field-effect transistor (DNA-FET) is studied here as a possible random-access memory (RAM) device for simple, selective and rapid ssDNA fragment retrieval used as data pool identifier. The DNA-FET is based on a co-planar Au-gated fully organic transistor appended with short single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) probes bearing a blocking molecule to prevent partial hybridization and achieve near perfect selectivity for short length ssDNA (up to 45 nt). Examination of transconductance of the novel active layer incorporating a DNA nanopore architecture reveals enhanced binding site accessibility. This, in turn, facilitates discriminatory hybridization, particularly in the physical retrieval of short-length ssDNA from a competitive, concentrated ssDNA background pool consisting of nine different sequences, with at least one nucleotide difference. The DNA-FET exhibits rapid operation (9 min) in the millivolt range, low detection limit (sub-femtomolar), high selectivity and reusability. Considering the straightforward concept, near error-free identification capacity and hypothetically outstanding scalability, the DNA-FET described here has potential as a foundation for further exploration of advanced RAM technology in the DNA data storage process.

Defects are generally regarded to have negative impacts on carrier recombination, charge transport, and ion migration in materials, which thus lower the efficiency, speed, and stability of optoelectronic devices. Meanwhile, lots of efforts which focused on minimizing defects have greatly improved the performances of devices. Then, can defects be positive in optoelectronic devices? Herein, relying on in-depth understanding of defect-associated effects in semiconductors, trapping of photo-generated carriers by defects is applied to enlarge photoconductive gain in photodetection. Therefore, the record photoconductive gain, gain-bandwidth product, and detection limit are achieved in this photodetector. Exceeding the general concept that defects are harmful, a new view that the defects can be positive in photodetection is identified, which may guide to design high-performance photodetectors.

Flexible piezoresistive-sensing materials with high sensitivity and stable sensing signals are highly required to meet the accurate detecting requirement for human motion. Herein, a conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(styrenesulfonate) / polydimethylsiloxane foam (P:P@p-PSF) composite with strong interfacial action is designed. The porous structures and good interface combination not only show outstanding mechanical flexibility and reliability but also possess high sensitivity at a relatively wide strain range. The P:P@p-PSF sensor achieves extreme sensitivity (Gauge Factor) of 6.25 in the subtle strain range of 1%–8%. Furthermore, the sensor forms a highly interconnected conductive network induced by the serious deformation of elastic-interconnect pores, thus providing extremely sensitive sensing behavior for a relatively wide strain range (97.4% resistance change rate at 60% compressive strain). Moreover, the sensor presents repeatable stability and good thermal adaptation, which would meet the critical requirements of subtle vital signs, human motion monitoring, and so on. This work supplies insight into the design of a new flexible sensor material to overcome the weak interface problem and the flexible mismatch between conductive filler and matrix, showing great application potential in the field of electronic skin.