Special Issue for Wearable Electrochemical Sensors

Abstract

Wearable sensors have garnered considerable recent interest in recent years owing to their tremendous promise for a wide range of healthcare, fitness or military applications. These wearable sensing platforms provide new avenues to monitor individuals continuously and can thus provide rich real-time information regarding a wearer's health and performance. While most early efforts on wearable fitness and biomedical devices have been devoted to the continuous monitoring of vital signs (such as heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature) from physical signals, wearable chemical sensors have received limited attention. The recent introduction of new non-invasive chemical sensors aims at filling current gaps in wearable sensor technology, as desired for mobile health monitoring and remote diagnostics. Wearable electrochemical sensors have been integrated recently onto both textile materials and directly on the epidermis for various monitoring applications owing to their unique ability to process chemical analytes in a non-invasive and non-obtrusive fashion. These recent efforts have led to tremendous attention to body-worn electrochemical devices, including potentiometric electrolyte sensors and amperometric biosensors for metabolites. The successful realization of wearable sensing devices requires the migration of electrochemical systems from traditional rigid and planar substrates to flexible, wearable, and conformal sheets. The field of wearable electrochemical sensors offers exciting collaborative opportunities and its future growth and success will rely on the abilities of the researchers to continue to innovate and collaborate to address the existing challenges and opportunities. The present Special Issue of Electroanalysis sheds useful insights into the latest advances and current trends in the field of wearable electrochemical sensors and biosensors. Given the rapid development of such body-worn sensors, the studies reported in this Special Issue are just the beginning of a fantastic topic and journey. I would like to thank all the authors who contributed to this issue. Joseph Wang, Chief Editor