A growing variety of sensors have increasingly significant impacts on everyday life. Key issues to take into consideration toward the integration of biosensing platforms include the demand for minimal costs and the potential for real time monitoring, particularly for point-of-care applications where simplicity must also be considered. In light of these developmental factors, electrochemical approaches are the most promising candidate technologies due to their simplicity, high sensitivity and specificity. The primary focus of this review is to highlight the utility of nanomaterials, which are currently being studied for in vivo and in vitro medical applications as robust and tunable diagnostic and therapeutic platforms. Highly sensitive and precise nanomaterials based biosensors have opened up the possibility of creating novel technologies for the early-stage detection and diagnosis of disease related biomarkers. The attractive properties of nanomaterials have paved the way for the fabrication of a wide range of electrochemical sensors that exhibit improved analytical capacities. This review aims to provide insights into nanomaterials based electrochemical sensors and to illustrate their benefits in various key biomedical applications. This emerging discipline, at the interface of chemistry and the life sciences, offers a broad palette of opportunities for researchers with interests that encompass nanomaterials synthesis, supramolecular chemistry, controllable drug delivery and targeted theranostics in biology and medicine.

Square wave voltammetry (SWV) has been widely used in the development of electrochemical sensors and biosensors in recent years due to its high selectivity and sensitivity. It is of great interest and importance to rapidly and sensitively detect disease-related biomarkers, environmental pollutants (e.g., heavy metals and other chemical contaminants), which are severely detrimental to human and animal life and the environment as a whole. Further, efficacious sensing is required for the detection of food resident contaminants (e.g., bacteria, viruses and parasites) and for the verification of the therapeutic ingredients of dietary supplements. Enzyme kinetics is another interesting domain that employs SWV as an effective analytical tool for the mechanistic study of enzyme reactions. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the electrochemical SWV method and its significant applications in sensing and biosensing spanning various fields such as diagnosis, environmental and food analysis and enzyme kinetics. The development of novel and improved electrode surfaces and nanomaterials introduces the possibility of sensors and biosensors that will exhibit even higher sensitivity, with SWV serving as an ideal methodology for its optimization. Concurrent with a better understanding of electrochemistry and life sciences, sensors and biosensors based on SWV have the potential to serve as next generation point-of-care diagnostic devices, as well as highly sensitive and selective detectors for food/environmental monitoring and enzyme studies.