Achievements and Challenges in Sensor Devices

Abstract

A sensor device’s purpose is to detect events or changes in the environment and send the information to its readout electronics or computer processors, meaning appropriate electronics are a fundamental requirement for sensor devices. In the early years, the sensing devices used to measure chemical, physical, or biological parameters were bulky. They were also often inaccurate, as the end user had to manually read and even decode the sensor signal. Nanotechnological interdisciplinary advancements have triggered many recent advances in the sensing field, opening many new solutions for highly engineered devices with excellent performance characteristics. Sensors play a central role in the improvements necessary to meet social demands, such as hazard detection (Rasheed et al., 2018), pollution problems and environmental remediation (Shak et al., 2018), energy production (Hou et al., 2018) and storage (Kawai et al., 2018), and biomedical treatments (Kumar and Liz-Marzán, 2019). They may be roughly classified according to the phenomena that needs to be sensed: chemical substances, physical conditions, or biological phenomena. Their variety has been steadily increasing over the years, and among them we have: