Recent progress in wearable extractive sampling technology

Abstract

The inevitable incline in the daily exposure to various chemicals has raised a necessity to monitor the body's exposure and biological responses to these stimuli more comprehensively and easily; conceivably, integrating novel designs, extractive phases, and state-of-the-art instrumentation with the primary aim of taking the chemical snapshot of the system. Wearable extractive devices are promising tools that are present in the analytical toolbox and address the abovementioned needs. These devices consist of a particular class of samplers that an individual can wear without limiting her/his daily life activities. In addition to being wearable, these devices show the ability to preconcentrate the analytes in an extractive phase while integrating the sampling and sample preparation. In addition to being imperative for personal exposure investigations, applications in diagnostic and prognostic health monitoring are among their emerging applications. Besides, in vivo soft samplers based on microextraction techniques provide non-invasive to low invasive approaches for non-lethal monitoring of various biosystems. Although in these applications they are not used in an ‘obvious way’ as wearable devices as they are not placed directly on the subject's skin and are instead immersed under the skin, in the scope of this review they will still be considered to provide a picture for future directions of extractive wearable devices. This review aims to cover the wearable extractive devices used in exposure studies (with a special focus on the last two years), in vivo, and in situ applications (with a focus on the last five years) where reliable information about the system is under interest.