Metal oxides nanowires chemical/gas sensors: recent advances

Chemical/gas sensors are playing and will play a crucial role in smart building, smart houses, environmental monitoring, food quality monitoring and in the customization of personalized medicine, as they allow a constant data collection to monitor all the parameters needed for a preventive intervention related to health and wealth of human beings together with the environment. Nanowires (NWs) and NW-based heterostructures thanks to their peculiar properties such as high crystallinity, flexibility, conductivity, and optical activity are key components of future sensing devices. Notwithstanding a rapid growth in smart, portable, and wearable chemical sensing devices, the development of reliable devices for the detection of chemicals, gases, and vapors is still needed together with the possibility to correlate the sensing data with health and wealth of the analyzed system: food, environment, and human beings. In this short review, I am going to report few recent studies and achievements devoted to increase the functional performances of chemical sensing devices, keeping the focus on materials, sensing transduction, and data extraction/evaluation.