Materials Science and the Sensor Revolution

For the past decade, the authors have been investigating strategies to develop ways to provide chemical sensing platforms capable of long-term deployment in remote locations. This key objective has been driven by the emergence of ubiquitous digital communications and the associated potential for widely deployed Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Understandably, in these early days of WSNs, deployments have been based on very reliable sensors, such as thermistors, accelerometers, flow meters, photodetectors, and digital cameras. Biosensors and chemical sensors (bio/chemosensors) are largely missing from this rapidly developing field, despite the obvious value offered by an ability to measure molecular targets at multiple locations in real-time.