More than 783 million people worldwide are currently without access to clean and safe water. Approximately 1 in 5 cases of mortality due to waterborne diseases involve children, and over 1.5 million cases of waterborne disease occur every year. In the developing world, this makes waterborne diseases the second highest cause of mortality. Such cases of waterborne disease are thought to be caused by poor sanitation, water infrastructure, public knowledge, and lack of suitable water monitoring systems. Conventional laboratory-based techniques are inadequate for effective on-site water quality monitoring purposes. This is due to their need for excessive equipment, operational complexity, lack of affordability, and long sample collection to data analysis times. In this review, we discuss the conventional techniques used in modern-day water quality testing. We discuss the future challenges of water quality testing in the developing world and how conventional techniques fall short of these challenges. Finally, we discuss the development of electrochemical biosensors and current research on the integration of these devices with microfluidic components to develop truly integrated, portable, simple to use and cost-effective devices for use by local environmental agencies, NGOs, and local communities in low-resource settings.

Centre for Biosensors Bioelectronics and Biodevices and Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY UK

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Mendel University in Brno Zemědělská 1665 1 613 00 Brno Czech Republic Central European Institute of Technology Brno University of Technology Purkynova 123 612 00 Brno Czech Republic

Citace poskytuje Crossref.org