(Digital Presentation) Review on Electronic Interfaces for Electrochemical Sensor – Enabling Research from the Lab to Market

Abstract

The recent development in the material sciences and facility to synthesis different types of materials made way for advances in electrochemical sensors. A lot of research articles being published on electrochemical sensors on different applications such as human health (metabolites, nutrients, biomarkers of diseases, or development pathologies), potential hazards (environmental pollutants, food contaminants, genotoxic chemicals, etc.), structural monitoring, animal health diagnosing, corrosion detection, Lab-on-chip solutions, etc. Most of the sensors are characterized in any of the detection principle measurement of current (amperometric), charge accumulation or a measurable potential (potentiometric) or change in the conductive properties of medium (conductometric), change in the impedance due to the change in the properties of the material due to species/analyte to be detected (impedimetric) and field-effect which exploits transistor principle to change in current a result of a potentiometric effect at a gate electrode. Most of the reported results are conducted by sophisticated expensive instruments. Researchers are unable to accentuate their research from their lab to market due to a lack of awareness of the instrumentation being used in the instrument. The prominent results of the lab need to be converted into any of the devices like point-of-care (POC), point-of-care testing (POCT), point-of-test (POT), point-of-interest/point-of-incidence (POI), or portable field device. The present review focuses on low-level measurements like quantifying microampere in resolution with nano ampere, mV changes as well as a few ohms to a few kilo-ohms. The current paper also explains to choose suitable components to design analog frontend to acquire signals from different types of electrochemical sensors. Current work also aims to create awareness on available Application-specific integrated circuits (IC) to design suitable instrumentation for the electrochemical sensor. Different power sources and Packaging techniques are also discussed to make the device portable, wearable, implantable, etc. Recent advancements in ultra-low power with more computational power capability microcontroller with various communication technologies appropriate to make device also elucidated in the paper. Thus, the paper imparts the required knowledge to do translation research on electrochemical biosensors.