ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the challenges together with the solutions proposed by our group during our work on the topic of wireless chemical sensing. The characteristics of an optimal sensor for distributed chemical sensing should include low-power operations capability, low cost, long-term reliability, and stability; it should also be easy to integrate with simple signal-conditioning schemes. State-of-the-art drift-correction algorithms, which subtract the contribution of drift to sensor responses, can provide very interesting results, but these need a significant number of samples themselves in order to ground the value of their free parameters. In any case, sensor drift remains a significant issue that prevents the spread of the use of multisensing devices in urban pollution scenarios. The network can adapt itself to a variable number of chemical sensors, thereby improving reliability. In networked configuration, sensor recalibration could also be performed cooperatively by temporarily adding other moving-reference sensors or, thanks to data-fusion techniques, using mutual recalibration strategies.
