Disposable sensors are low‐cost and easy‐to‐use sensing devices intended for short‐term or rapid single‐point measurements. The growing demand for fast, accessible, and reliable information in a vastly connected world makes disposable sensors increasingly important. The areas of application for such devices are numerous, ranging from pharmaceutical, agricultural, environmental, forensic, and food sciences to wearables and clinical diagnostics, especially in resource‐limited settings. The capabilities of disposable sensors can extend beyond measuring traditional physical quantities (for example, temperature or pressure); they can provide critical chemical and biological information (chemo‐ and biosensors) that can be digitized and made available to users and centralized/decentralized facilities for data storage, remotely. These features could pave the way for new classes of low‐cost systems for health, food, and environmental monitoring that can democratize sensing across the globe. Here, a brief insight into the materials and basics of sensors (methods of transduction, molecular recognition, and amplification) is provided followed by a comprehensive and critical overview of the disposable sensors currently used for medical diagnostics, food, and environmental analysis. Finally, views on how the field of disposable sensing devices will continue its evolution are discussed, including the future trends, challenges, and opportunities.

Screen-printed technology has helped considerably to the development of portable electrochemical sensors since it provides miniaturized but robust and user-friendly electrodes. Moreover, this technology allows to obtain very versatile transducers, not only regarding their design, but also their ease of modification. Therefore, in the last decades, the use of screen-printed electrodes (SPEs) has exponentially increased, with ceramic as the main substrate. However, with the growing interest in the use of cheap and widely available materials as the basis of analytical devices, paper or other low-cost flat materials have become common substrates for SPEs. Thus, in this revision, a comprehensive overview on paper-based SPEs used for analytical proposes is provided. A great variety of designs is reported, together with several examples to illustrate the main applications.