Sensing at Your Fingertips: Glove-based Wearable Chemical Sensors

In this review, we detail the evolution and recent progress of glove-based wearable electrochemical sensors with focus on forensic, security, and defense applications. Glove-based wearable sensors offer the ability to have rapid, on-site chemical and biological threat assessment, ranging from explosive and gunshot residues to drugs of abuse and pesticides, critical for timely and informed incident management and investigation. Additionally, these field deployable systems offer the ability for law enforcement to complete on-the-spot qualitative chemical testing for immediate forensic evidence collection in connection to mechanical 'swipe' sampling. Recent advances have been made for translation of this class of wearable electrochemical sensors to increase the sensory perspective of robotics, demonstrating the progression to robotic skin with chemical analysis capability suitable for translation to remote chemical analysis in hazardous scenarios. Critical to such progress have been advances in flexible electrochemically-compatible materials and design, with increasing functionality, leveraging from advances in wearable biosensors and electronic miniaturization. Indeed, the customization potential of these wearable systems is great, yet challenges remain for advancing these systems from prototypes to more ubiquitous devices readily deployed in the field. With significant attention these challenges can be overcome, creating new opportunities for further decentralization of electrochemical analyses using these flexible and intuitive glove-based wearable sensing systems for significant impact on fields such as forensics, defense, biomedical, robotics and beyond.