ABSTRACT
Sensitive and reliable sensors are important in many areas including environmental, medical, food and water safety, homeland security, and the chemical industry. Ideally, such sensors should also be low cost, compact, easy to fabricate, user friendly, fast in response, and suitable for high throughput monitoring of complex samples. Despite signifi cant expansion in the fi eld of chemical and biological sensors, their development, in particular that of fi elddeployable devices for monitoring multiple analytes, remains a challenge. Several viable options to encounter this challenge, which are under different stages of development, are based on organic electronics. These options include, e.g., organic thin-fi lm transistors (OTFTs), as well as PL-based sensors with small-molecular OLEDs (SMOLEDs) or polymer LEDs (PLEDs) as
the excitation source. Currently, the use of organic-based photodetectors for monitoring analyte-induced changes in the PL intensity or decay time of the sensor component is also being explored.
