Despite their great promise and many years of investigation, only a limited number of sensors are commercially available to the public at present.Perhaps the most successful example of such a sensor is the personal glucose meter (PGM).The personal glucose meter (PGM) is a successful device for point-of-care testing, which has wide accessibility to the public worldwide due to a great deal of advantages including the portable “pocket” size, cost effectiveness, reliable quantitative results and easy operation.
The wide success of PGMs is largely due to their portable ‘pocket’ size, low cost, reliable quantitative results and simple operation. With their recent integration into mobile phones (for an example of a glucose meter integrated with the Apple iPhone, see http://ibgstar.com/web/ibgstar), PGMs are likely to find an even wider base of users. Although a number of other methods have been developed to quantitatively detect targets of interest using simple instruments, most such sensing devices have not been able to match the PGM in its wide commercial availability to the public. However, the PGM is still limited in that it can detect only a single target, glucose.
However, the application of this successful portable sensor is still limited in its single target (glucose) and its dynamic range of 10–600 mg/dL or 0.6–33 mM glucose . Recently, different approaches have been developed to expand the application of PGM. For example, Xiang and Lu developed some sensors to monitor a series of nonglucose targets by taking advantage of invertaselabeled functional DNAs and antibodies.