Sensors in the Era of Internet of Things and Industrial Internet: Innovations in Materials, Transducers, and Data Analytics

Modern monitoring scenarios of gases and liquids for industrial safety and productivity, medical diagnostics, environmental surveillance, and other Internet of Things and Industrial Internet applications demand new sensing performance capabilities of higher reliability, better accuracy, lower power consumption; all of these in unobtrusive form factors and at low cost. A new generation of gas and liquid sensors based on the multivariable response principles are under development in our laboratories to meet these new demanding sensing requirements. Multivariable sensors provide several partially or fully independent responses from an individual device to allow quantitation of several environmental parameters of interest, rejection of interferences, and correction for environmental instabilities. This innovative multivariable sensing approach is attractive in numerous scenarios when manual inspection or the use of "classic" analytical instruments would be canceled by given application requirements.