The demand for wearable sensors has been grown rapidly over the past few years, mainly those related to monitor health, fitness and their surroundings. Consequently, wearable chemical sensing has become a crucial appliance area for wireless sensors and has proved to be a very challenging and multidisciplinary area. The great advantage of coupling wireless communication to different types of wearable sensors is the enhancement of the sensor’s scope for remote and resource-limited settings with the possibility of obtaining real-time data acquisition and application in different areas like homeland defense, home-based healthcare, and food logistics. Being the electrochemical sensors considered attractive and promising to use in the wireless chemical sensor field, due to its features such as simple structure, the possibility of miniaturization, comfort, simplicity of operation, high sensitivity, fast response, relatively low energy consumption and low manufacturing cost. Furthermore, wearable electrochemical sensors enable obtaining insights into individuals' health status through the noninvasive monitoring of clinically relevant biomarkers in different biofluids without complex sampling, manipulation and treatment steps. In this review, we present the main advances in technologies used in the development of fully integrated wireless wearable electrochemical devices, such as communication protocols, data collection and privacy concerns and power sources. We also discuss in a critical way the main challenges, trends, strategies and new technologies that will drive this research line in the future. Lastly, we highlight the progress in the last few years in healthcare, sports, security and defense, and forensic applications.
We reported here three simple, low cost and easy to accomplish strategies for the fabrication of microelectrodes and other conductive patterns using ordinary office laser‐printers. In this work, toner patterns were directly printed onto the flexible substrate, acting as a mask to create the intended conductive design. To highlight the versatility of such technology, toner‐printed patterns were employed in two diverse ways: one in which the patterned toner had the exact design of the electrode and other employing a reverse toner‐printed pattern. The first one was used for the adaptation of the well‐known printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication technique, but using direct toner printing (DTP) in an already conductive flexible substrate. The second was employed for the two remaining strategies: one based on the deposition of conductive film, followed by lift‐off process; and another based on drop‐casting of a conductive ink into the formed toner cavities, followed by thermal cure. As proof‐of‐concept, all three DTP strategies were used for the fabrication of miniaturized gold electrodes in polyimide substrate, and electrochemical performance of each obtained electrode was evaluated by cyclic voltammetry. Insights about DTP technology, alignment issues, advantages, limitations and resolution of each presented approach were provided. Finally, direct toner printing showed to be a simple, affordable and quite promising technology for the fabrication of low cost point‐of‐care electrochemical devices using flexible platforms.
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