Identifying disease biomarkers and detecting hazardous, explosive, flammable, and polluting gases and chemicals with extremely sensitive and selective sensor devices remains a challenging and time-consuming research challenge. Due to their exceptional characteristics, semiconducting metal oxides (SMOxs) have received a lot of attention in terms of the development of various types of sensors in recent years. The key performance indicators of SMOx-based sensors are their sensitivity, selectivity, recovery time, and steady response over time. SMOx-based sensors are discussed in this review based on their different properties. Surface properties of the functional material, such as its (nano)structure, morphology, and crystallinity, greatly influence sensor performance. A few examples of the complicated and poorly understood processes involved in SMOx sensing systems are adsorption and chemisorption, charge transfers, and oxygen migration. The future prospects of SMOx-based gas sensors, chemical sensors, and biological sensors are also discussed.

In recent years, flexible conductive materials have attracted considerable attention for their potential use in flexible energy storage devices, touch panels, sensors, memristors, and other applications.

Performance of photonic devices critically depends upon their efficiency on controlling the flow of light therein. In the recent past, the implementation of plasmonics, two-dimensional (2D) materials and metamaterials for enhanced light-matter interaction (through concepts such as sub-wavelength light confinement and dynamic wavefront shape manipulation) led to diverse applications belonging to spectroscopy, imaging and optical sensing etc. While 2D materials such as graphene, MoS₂ etc., are still being explored in optical sensing in last few years, the application of plasmonics and metamaterials is limited owing to the involvement of noble metals having a constant electron density. The capability of competently controlling the electron density of noble metals is very limited. Further, due to absorption characteristics of metals, the plasmonic and metamaterial devices suffer from large optical loss. Hence, the photonic devices (sensors, in particular) require that an efficient dynamic control of light at nanoscale through field (electric or optical) variation using substitute low-loss materials. One such option may be plasmonic metasurfaces. Metasurfaces are arrays of optical antenna-like anisotropic structures (sub-wavelength size), which are designated to control the amplitude and phase of reflected, scattered and transmitted components of incident light radiation. The present review put forth recent development on metamaterial and metastructure-based various sensors.

MXenes, a novel class of two-dimensional materials, have recently emerged as promising candidates for biomedical applications due to their specific structural features and exceptional physicochemical and biological properties.

A fiber optic chlorine gas sensor working on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technique fabricated using coatings of silver and zinc oxide films over unclad core of the optical fiber is reported. The sensor probe is characterized using wavelength interrogation and recording SPR spectra for different concentrations of chlorine gas around the probe. A red shift is observed in the resonance wavelength on increasing the concentration of the chlorine gas. The thickness of the zinc oxide film is optimized to achieve the maximum sensitivity of the sensor. In addition to wavelength interrogation, the sensor can also work on intensity modulation. The selectivity of the sensor towards chlorine gas is verified by carrying out measurements for different gases. The sensor has various advantages such as better sensitivity, good selectivity, reusability, fast response, low cost, capability of online monitoring and remote sensing.