Functionalized nanomaterial-based medical sensors for point-of-care applications: An overview

Recently, the development of economic, sensitive, and accurate tests has received more attention from many clinical and analytical laboratories. With particular benefits of low cost and portability, the miniaturized analytical system has been getting more attention with the growing requirements for point-of-care (POC) testing. POC tests offering quick diagnostic information in nonlaboratory environments have a critical role in healthcare procedures, especially for diagnosis, treatment, economics, healthcare management, and supervision. POC technologies can be divided into small handheld devices for the qualitative or quantitative analysis of analytes in a broad range. Those are bigger, often bench-top devices that are laboratory instruments. Size and complexity have been decreased in these devices. Miniaturized electrochemical sensors based on various materials (e.g., paper, DNA, and nanomaterials) play a crucial role in analytical fields because of their high sensitivity, portability, ease of operation, and analysis in a short time. In recent years, such electrical devices have been broadly utilized for POC tests in several fields, including health care and clinical diagnosis. This is due to providing information on the medical diagnosis in a simple, rapid, and economical way with handheld and compact analyzers. The coupling of electrochemical devices with nanomaterials offers a new impetus for generating new medical sensors for POC applications. This chapter will review developments on various types of portable MEC sensors focusing on functionalized medical sensors with nanomaterials in POC devices for clinical analysis and diagnostics.