Advances in the Development of Innovative Sensor Platforms for Field Analysis

Abstract

Sustainable growth, environmental preservation, and improvement of life quality are strategic fields of worldwide interest and cornerstones of international policies. Humanity health and prosperity are closely related to our present choices on sustainable development. The main sources of pollution concern industry, including mining, chemical companies, and refineries, wastewater treatment; and consumers themselves. In order to guide and evaluate the effects of environmental policies, diffuse monitoring campaigns and detailed (big) data analyses are needed. In this respect, the development and availability of innovative sensor platforms for field analysis and remote sensing are of crucial relevance. In this review, we provide an overview of the area, analyzing the major needs, available technologies, novel approaches, and perspectives. Among environmental pollutants that threaten the biosphere, we focus on inorganic and organic contaminants, which affect air and water quality. We describe the technologies for their assessment in the environment and then draw some conclusions and mention future perspectives opened by the integration of sensing technologies with robotics and the Internet of Things. Without the ambition to be exhaustive in such a rapidly growing field, this review is intended as a support for researchers and stakeholders looking for current, state-of-the-art, and key enabling technologies for environmental monitoring.

Miniaturized Sensors for Detection of Ethanol in Water Based on Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy and Resonant Perturbation Method—A Comparative Study

“…Portable and low-cost sensors for the detection of chemicals in liquid are finding an ever growing demand in many application fields, such as in the food industry [ 1 , 2 ], medical diagnostics [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ] and environmental monitoring of contaminants and pollutants [ 7 ].…”

Flood Susceptibility Modeling in a Subtropical Humid Low-Relief Alluvial Plain Environment: Application of Novel Ensemble Machine Learning Approach

“…The recent developments in remote sensing satellite technologies and sensors (Toth and Jóźków, 2016;Zhang X. et al, 2019;Han et al, 2019;Weiss et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2021), rise in number of available platforms for the satellite data access (Boerner, 2007;Rizzato et al, 2020), and improvements in other low altitude geospatial technologies like lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (Rizzato et al, 2020) have aided to ease the monitoring and analysis of natural hazards and disasters (Gillespie et al, 2007) at various spatial and temporal scales. Since monitoring floods in urban settings is difficult due to narrow open space among the concrete jungles, use of UAVs immensely helps to monitor and quantify the flooded and floodinduced damages (Yalcin, 2018).…”

Development of Multi-Item Air Quality Monitoring System Based on Real-Time Data

“…Stanaway et al (2018) reported that the exposure to particulate matter less than 2.5 µm in diameter decreased the world average life span in 2016 by more than 1 year [8]. Particles less than 1.0 µm in diameter negatively affect the air-blood barrier near the lungs and cause illnesses such as stroke, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and respiratory infections [9]. Rizzato et al (2020) concluded that particulate matter can have a devastating effect on vulnerable groups, including the elderly, pregnant women, and children, and it appears that it is closely related to mortality [9].…”

“…As hazardous chemicals such as volatile organic compounds, propanol, and toluene, they exhibit high vapor pressure at room temperature and can be dispersed in certain concentrations in the air, causing air pollution [14]. Methane is colorless, odorless, and non-toxic, but at high concentrations, it causes the risk of asphyxiation and explosion due to oxygen depletion [9].…”