CHAPTER 7: Metal Oxide-based Disposable Sensors for Health Monitoring

Metal oxides and their use as disposable sensors in food, environment, and particularly health monitoring have been addressed over recent decades due to their low-cost, ease of use, high sensitivity, fast response and reliability. Metal oxides are more suitable for disposable electrochemical sensors due to their unique physical properties such as low-cost, ease of use and abundance in nature. This chapter provides an overview of metal oxides and their composites used in the fabrication of disposal sensors. It includes various synthesis routes, characterization and properties of metal oxides and composites. Special importance is given to nanostructures and cost-effective disposable screen-printed electrodes (SPEs). Moreover, using metal oxides and their composites towards various electrochemical detection techniques used in sensors such as potentiostatic/galvanostatic and chemiresistive methods to determine electrochemical characteristics of the sensitivity, limit of detection, linear range and selectivity are discussed. This chapter concludes by raising the importance of cost-effective metal oxide-based disposable electrochemical sensors so as make key headway towards health monitoring conclusions.