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Sensing at Point-of-Need
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Sensing at Point-of-Need

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Biosensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2022) | Viewed by 12196

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Mun'delanji Vestergaard

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Food Science and Biotechnology, Kagoshima University, 1-21-24 Korimoto, Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture 890-8580, Japan
Interests: electrochemical and optical biosensors; bio-efficacy of natural products; biofunctional materials; point-of-need application; biomimetic membranes
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Eiichi Tamiya

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. Advanced Photonics and Biosensing Open Innovation Laboratory, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, 2-1 Yamadaoka, Suita 565-0871, Osaka, Japan
2. Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, 8-1 Mihogaoka, Ibaraki 567-0047, Osaka, Japan
Interests: nanobiotechnology; advanced biosensor; bioMEMS; cell based device; biosensors for IoT
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are living in an age undergoing rapid changes. This requires quick detection methods at points-of-need, and effective rapid responses. Climate change is wrecking havoc in the fields of food and agriculture - including emergence of new crop and animal diseases. This calls for robust, rapid, scalable and transferable technologies to detect appropriate molecular markers for the diseases. An even more pressing need for these technologies is in the bio-medical field. It has been shown that early detection of diseases including cancers, HIV, malaria, and diabetes type 2, provide better prognosis and disease management for patients. Where applicable, early detection also minimizes the risks of disease transmission. Indeed, infectious diseases remain the leading cause of mortality around the world. Only within the past 10 years, we have witnessed the devastating effects of the Zika virus, The West African Ebola virus epidemic, and now the pandemic Coronavirus disease (Covid 19) virus. Detecting diseases at their onset is crucial in administering therapeutic management interventions, and reduce or stop disease transmissions. Although huge strides have been made in the development of sensing technologies to address the growing needs, a huge challenge remains: quick sensitive detection of target molecules at points point where it is needed (point-of-need).  Some of the major stumbling blocks arise from challenges such as sample preparation, matrix effects, cumbersome equipment, need for integration, trained analyst, data processing and rapid information sharing. Advances in digital technologies have enabled people and things to constantly stay connected and synchronized. We are now in an ever-connected world, and full of possibilities, including possibilities to advance sensing of pathophysiological markers _at point-of-need.

In this Special Issue, we welcome original research contributions and state-of-the-art reviews from academia and industry regarding the synthesis and characterization of [nano-, bio-] materials; simplification/integration of analytical processes; fabrication of sensing technologies tools and devices; and integration of digital techonologies _for applications at-point-of need. We focus on sensing technologies for direct and indirect pathophysiological markers for plant and animal diseases, including human beings. Developments towards 'power-free' wide-usage in remote areas _inclusive technonologies_ are also encouraged. Although opinion pieces and perspectives are welcome, a proposal should first be submitted to the Editors for review. The Special Issue topics include but are not limited to:

  • Synthesis of nanomaterials for point-of-need sensor fabrication
  • Biofunctional, Biomimicking materials for sensor fabrication
  • Chemoresistive sensor fabrication.
  • Fabrication of biosensors
  • Pathophysiological markers (Biomarkers) for plant and animal diseases
  • Bio- and Nano-material functionalization
  • Simplification and integration of analytical processes
  • IoT data for sensing technologies.
  • Sensor applications at point-of-need
  • Inclusive sensing towards attainment of SDGs.

Dr. Mun'delanji Vestergaard
Prof. Dr. Eiichi Tamiya
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Sensing technologies
  • Point-of-need
  • Biosensors
  • Chemo-receptive sensors
  • Nanomaterials
  • Bio functionalization
  • Biomarkers
  • Microfluidics
  • Portable sensing systems
  • Diseases diagnostics
  • Lab-on-Paper
  • Lab-on-Chip
  • Lab-on-Skin
  • Wearable devices
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Data processing

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

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14 pages, 1773 KiB  
Article
Portable Prussian Blue-Based Sensor for Bacterial Detection in Urine
by Carolin Psotta, Vivek Chaturvedi, Juan F. Gonzalez-Martinez, Javier Sotres and Magnus Falk
Sensors 2023, 23(1), 388; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s23010388 - 30 Dec 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2489
Abstract
Bacterial infections can affect the skin, lungs, blood, and brain, and are among the leading causes of mortality globally. Early infection detection is critical in diagnosis and treatment but is a time- and work-consuming process taking several days, creating a hitherto unmet need [...] Read more.
Bacterial infections can affect the skin, lungs, blood, and brain, and are among the leading causes of mortality globally. Early infection detection is critical in diagnosis and treatment but is a time- and work-consuming process taking several days, creating a hitherto unmet need to develop simple, rapid, and accurate methods for bacterial detection at the point of care. The most frequent type of bacterial infection is infection of the urinary tract. Here, we present a wireless-enabled, portable, potentiometric sensor for E. coli. E. coli was chosen as a model bacterium since it is the most common cause of urinary tract infections. The sensing principle is based on reduction of Prussian blue by the metabolic activity of the bacteria, detected by monitoring the potential of the sensor, transferring the sensor signal via Bluetooth, and recording the output on a laptop or a mobile phone. In sensing of bacteria in an artificial urine medium, E. coli was detected in ~4 h (237 ± 19 min; n = 4) and in less than 0.5 h (21 ± 7 min, n = 3) using initial E. coli concentrations of ~103 and 105 cells mL−1, respectively, which is under or on the limit for classification of a urinary tract infection. Detection of E. coli was also demonstrated in authentic urine samples with bacteria concentration as low as 104 cells mL−1, with a similar response recorded between urine samples collected from different volunteers as well as from morning and afternoon urine samples. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensing at Point-of-Need)
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21 pages, 834 KiB  
Article
Considerations and Challenges for Real-World Deployment of an Acoustic-Based COVID-19 Screening System
by Drew Grant, Ian McLane, Valerie Rennoll and James West
Sensors 2022, 22(23), 9530; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s22239530 - 06 Dec 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1640
Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to countless deaths and widespread global disruptions. Acoustic-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools could provide a simple, scalable, and prompt method to screen for COVID-19 using easily acquirable physiological sounds. These systems have been demonstrated previously and have [...] Read more.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to countless deaths and widespread global disruptions. Acoustic-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools could provide a simple, scalable, and prompt method to screen for COVID-19 using easily acquirable physiological sounds. These systems have been demonstrated previously and have shown promise but lack robust analysis of their deployment in real-world settings when faced with diverse recording equipment, noise environments, and test subjects. The primary aim of this work is to begin to understand the impacts of these real-world deployment challenges on the system performance. Using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and RelAtive SpecTrAl-Perceptual Linear Prediction (RASTA-PLP) features extracted from cough, speech, and breathing sounds in a crowdsourced dataset, we present a baseline classification system that obtains an average receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.77 when discriminating between COVID-19 and non-COVID subjects. The classifier performance is then evaluated on four additional datasets, resulting in performance variations between 0.64 and 0.87 AUC-ROC, depending on the sound type. By analyzing subsets of the available recordings, it is noted that the system performance degrades with certain recording devices, noise contamination, and with symptom status. Furthermore, performance degrades when a uniform classification threshold from the training data is subsequently used across all datasets. However, the system performance is robust to confounding factors, such as gender, age group, and the presence of other respiratory conditions. Finally, when analyzing multiple speech recordings from the same subjects, the system achieves promising performance with an AUC-ROC of 0.78, though the classification does appear to be impacted by natural speech variations. Overall, the proposed system, and by extension other acoustic-based diagnostic aids in the literature, could provide comparable accuracy to rapid antigen testing but significant deployment challenges need to be understood and addressed prior to clinical use. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensing at Point-of-Need)
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Review

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33 pages, 4916 KiB  
Review
Multiplexed Prostate Cancer Companion Diagnostic Devices
by Josephine Aidoo-Brown, Despina Moschou and Pedro Estrela
Sensors 2021, 21(15), 5023; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s21155023 - 24 Jul 2021
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3841
Abstract
Prostate cancer (PCa) remains one of the most prominent forms of cancer for men. Since the early 1990s, Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) has been a commonly recognized PCa-associated protein biomarker. However, PSA testing has been shown to lack in specificity and sensitivity when needed [...] Read more.
Prostate cancer (PCa) remains one of the most prominent forms of cancer for men. Since the early 1990s, Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) has been a commonly recognized PCa-associated protein biomarker. However, PSA testing has been shown to lack in specificity and sensitivity when needed to diagnose, monitor and/or treat PCa patients successfully. One enhancement could include the simultaneous detection of multiple PCa-associated protein biomarkers alongside PSA, also known as multiplexing. If conventional methods such as the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) are used, multiplexed detection of such protein biomarkers can result in an increase in the required sample volume, in the complexity of the analytical procedures, and in adding to the cost. Using companion diagnostic devices such as biosensors, which can be portable and cost-effective with multiplexing capacities, may address these limitations. This review explores recent research for multiplexed PCa protein biomarker detection using optical and electrochemical biosensor platforms. Some of the novel and potential serum-based PCa protein biomarkers will be discussed in this review. In addition, this review discusses the importance of converting research protocols into multiplex point-of-care testing (xPOCT) devices to be used in near-patient settings, providing a more personalized approach to PCa patients’ diagnostic, surveillance and treatment management. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensing at Point-of-Need)
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Other

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14 pages, 8380 KiB  
Opinion
Portable Electrochemical DNA Sensors Based on Gene Amplification Reactions to Screen and Identify Pathogen and SNPs
by Eiichi Tamiya
Sensors 2022, 22(5), 1865; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/s22051865 - 26 Feb 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2986
Abstract
In this paper, we introduce portable sensors based on genetic measurements that can be used in the field for the diagnosis of infectious diseases and disease risk based on SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). In particular, the sensors are based on electrochemical measurements that [...] Read more.
In this paper, we introduce portable sensors based on genetic measurements that can be used in the field for the diagnosis of infectious diseases and disease risk based on SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). In particular, the sensors are based on electrochemical measurements that can be performed with printed electrodes and small measuring devices. Indicator molecules that can bind to nucleic acid molecules in various ways are already known, and some of these molecules have electrochemical activity. First, we investigated the change in their electrochemical responses in a solution system. As a result, we searched for nucleic acid-binding molecules whose current value changes in the presence of DNA. In addition, when we measured the change in the current value, associated with the amplification of specific genes, such as PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification), we found that the current value decreased with the number of amplifications, indicating that specific genes can be monitored electrochemically. Based on this principle, we showed that pathogenic microorganisms and viruses, such as Salmonella, O157 E. coli, hepatitis B virus, periodontal disease bacteria, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and influenza virus, were able to be measured. The method was also applied to the diagnosis of SNPs, such as ApoE (apolipoprotein E), which is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Rapid PCR was available with a microfluidic device, and a simple method was also presented with the isothermal amplification of LAMP. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensing at Point-of-Need)
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