Final Report Summary - BETTERSENSE (Nanodevice Engineering for a Better Chemical Gas Sensing Technology)
Excessive power consumption and poor specificity are two of the main challenges that low-cost gas sensors are facing today. If power consumption were significantly reduced, including these devices in daily life products, like smartphones or Internet of Things gadgets, would be a no brainer. If low-cost gas sensors were truly able of specifically detecting only the kind of molecule they were designed to, with low chances of failure, analytics with a quality similar to that only found today in laboratories would be affordable, accessible and ubiquitous. In short, if these two features were available, the way we monitor today human safety and security would radically change. The aim of BetterSense has been addressing these two issues and rendering a new kind of sensor technology satisfying these unmet needs at once. During the project, we have developed gas sensors capable of operating with just a few microwatts of power, and new detection methods that can be tailored to target one single kind of molecule in presence of many others.