Sensor Devices Inspired by the Five Senses: A Review

Wearable devices (wearables) have recently gained significant traction and are predicted to dominate many areas of research over the next 5 years. Many wearables contain a host of sensors that feedback vital bodily parameters to a central system. Although many artificial sensors exist, the biggest challenge to medical wearables is to interface and harness the “big data” set from the human bodies own complex sensor network to better allow early diagnosis and/or treatment and prevention of diseases that have a huge economic burden on society such as type II diabetes. Cybernetics and medicine are joining their forces to overcome the new challenges in developing smarter, more intuitive and smaller sensors that interface with the human sensory system. This review is focused on the interface of devices to ion-mediated transduction pathways both through G-Coupled Protein Receptors and direct or mechanically transduced ion pathways.