Editorial pubs.acs.org/acssensors
Wearable Sensors − An Exciting Area of Research for Sensor Scientists very once in a while a new application field is identified that brings out the best in interdisciplinary sensor science. Wearable sensors is such an area. This philosophy is at the very center of sensor research. Indeed, we do not aim to compete with routine laboratory instrumentation in terms of analytical figures of merit. We simply can go places now that we could not before. Wearable devices bring the ability to continuously monitor key chemical parameters of individuals as they go about their lives, or perform in difficult environments. This forms the very basis for personalized medicine, as any treatment must be accompanied by adequate measurement data. Workplace safety is another area of interest where these systems are sought, making it possible to rapidly respond to critical situations on one hand, and to monitor accumulated exposures over time on the other. The military needs similar applications for their combat personnel. Finally, wearable sensors perfectly fit in the current trend of continuous fitness monitoring systems in combination with mobile devices. The ability to track progress and share data is central to the democratization of health care monitoring, where the goal is to empower the individual to observe and manage the evolution of key parameters. Wearable sensors are only the next natural progression of bringing the measurement ever closer to the system (or individual) of interest. This development started in hospitals, aiming to shorten the long turnaround times needed for sending samples from the patient to a centralized laboratory for analysis. In critical care situations, that workflow was (and often still is) not acceptable and certainly not compatible with the tight time frames required to make acute therapeutic decisions in that environment. Hand-held point-of-care devices have therefore been developed and made available in hospitals for some time now. Sensor researchers were pivotal to this breakthrough. This development then continued with hand-held devices that patients can use at home to reduce medical visits. Glucose monitors, in particular, have been a phenomenal success story in this regard. This field, which is now considered mature, used to be the playground for a generation of sensor scientists. Now with wearable sensors, we have an important application area, which is also extremely challenging, with important questions needing to be addressed. Some of these questions relate to fundamental materials properties that involve stretchable and breathable materials that are still conducive to detecting a chemically relevant species. Much of this involves new science that needs to be understood and characterized. Next are the questions related to the actual sampling and detection steps and underlying detection protocols. These are not trivial as the sensors need to operate reliably, if at all possible, without any intervention from the user (read calibration). The outputs need to be traceable and demonstrated to be in reasonable agreement with reference methods. If sweat parameters are collected and measured, but blood parameters are of interest, correlations between the two must
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be shown to be reliable. Then we are concerned about the power resources of these systems, and innovative approaches in the area of (bio)fuel cells are needed to make the use of these devices routine. Lastly, adequate data management and transmission form part of the systems development, and must be integrated for a useful and convincing wearable sensor. Good research requires a multidisciplinary effort involving materials science, device, software and biomedical engineering, and analytical chemistry. It is hard. It is fun. These are the kinds of projects that get us excited. We place our hopes in the field to be serious, and mature, and provide solid science that will make true progress in this field. Good examples are found in recent contributions to ACS Sensors, with an excellent Perspective article written by Joseph Wang’s group that identifies key challenges in this field (DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.6b00250). Primary research papers of interest that we have published so far include the work by Wenlong Cheng and co-workers on stretchable sensors for monitoring human motion (DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.5b00195), and by Khiabani et al. for a wearable sun exposure sensor (DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.6b00244). We also point out research that graces the cover of issue 7 of the journal by Ali Javey and co-workers, who recently described a wearable sensor based on the stripping voltammetry of transition metals (DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.6b00287). We applaud the authors of these studies for using human subjects, and for crossvalidating their sensors with a reference method. We are looking forward to more excellent and stimulating work in this exciting area.
Eric Bakker, Associate Editor The University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
J. Justin Gooding, Editor-in-Chief
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The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Received: July 7, 2016 Published: July 22, 2016 834
DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.6b00423 ACS Sens. 2016, 1, 834−834
