Technologies for the Development of Polymeric Sensors

In recent years, the interest of the scientific community towards new technologies for sensor fabrication has grown, in particular with regards to the possibility of creating flexible and low-cost sensors, devices and electronic circuits, motivated by the need to increasingly reduce development times and costs manufacturing of sensors and electronic devices. The ever-widening diffusion of applications that use wearable, disposable and low-cost devices has raised also the needing of producing sensors based on sustainable production technologies, possibly recyclable and, anyway, with a low environmental impact, after their useful life. The research team at the SensorLab@DIEEI of the University of Catania, Italy, has been involved, since decades, in research activities on new technologies, such as Inkjet printing and Micromilling for the rapid prototyping of sensors, silicon-based MEMS, flexible polymeric sensors and Biopolymer-based sensors. In this paper, the technologies are introduced and a set of meaningful examples are briefly described. In particular, for the sake of comparison, the selected examples are in all the cases accelerometers.