Water quality is one of the most critical indicators of environmental pollution and it affects all of us. Water contamination can be accidental or intentional and the consequences are drastic unless the appropriate measures are adopted on the spot. This review provides a critical assessment of the applicability of various technologies for real-time water quality monitoring, focusing on those that have been reportedly tested in real-life scenarios. Specifically, the performance of sensors based on molecularly imprinted polymers is evaluated in detail, also giving insights into their principle of operation, stability in real on-site applications and mass production options. Such characteristics as sensing range and limit of detection are given for the most promising systems, that were verified outside of laboratory conditions. Then, novel trends of using microwave spectroscopy and chemical materials integration for achieving a higher sensitivity to and selectivity of pollutants in water are described.

Currently, there are no established procedures for limit of detection (LOD) evaluation in multisensor system studies, which complicates their correct comparison with other analytical techniques and hinders further development of the method. In this study we propose a simple and visually comprehensible approach for LOD estimation in multisensor analysis. The suggested approach is based on the assessment of evolution of mean relative error values in calibration series with growing analyte concentration. The LOD value is estimated as the concentration starting from which MRE values become stable from sample to sample. This intuitive procedure was successfully tested with a variety of real data from potentiometric multisensor systems.

Electronic tongue technology based on arrays of cross-sensitive chemical sensors and chemometric data processing has attracted a lot of researchers' attention through the last years. Several so far reported applications dealing with pharmaceutical related tasks employed different e-tongue systems to address different objectives. In this situation, it is hard to judge on the benefits and drawbacks of particular e-tongue implementations for R&D in pharmaceutics. The objective of this study was to compare the performance of six different e-tongues applied to the same set of pharmaceutical samples. For this purpose, two commercially available systems (from Insent and AlphaMOS) and four laboratory prototype systems (two potentiometric systems from Warsaw operating in flow and static modes, one potentiometric system from St. Petersburg, one voltammetric system from Barcelona) were employed. The sample set addressed in the study comprised nine different formulations based on caffeine citrate, lactose monohydrate, maltodextrine, saccharin sodium and citric acid in various combinations. To provide for the fair and unbiased comparison, samples were evaluated under blind conditions and data processing from all the systems was performed in a uniform way. Different mathematical methods were applied to judge on similarity of the e-tongues response from the samples. These were principal component analysis (PCA), RV' matrix correlation coefficients and Tuckeŕs congruency coefficients.

The potentiometric electronic tongue system has been tested as a potential analytical tool for brand uniformity control of monoculture Apulian red wines (Primitivo and Negroamaro). The sensor array was composed of eight porphyrin coatings obtained by electrochemical polymerization process and was employed for both wines discrimination and quantitative detection of wine defect compounds: “off-odour” 3-(methylthio)-propanol; isoamyl alcohol fusel oil; benzaldehyde (marker of the yeast activity) and acetic acid (marker of vinegar formation). PLS-DA applied to Electronic tongue output data has permitted a correct discrimination of more than 70% of analysed wines in respect to the original brand affiliation. Satisfactory PLS1 predictions were obtained in real wine samples; with R² = 0.989 for isoamyl alcohol and R² = 0.732 for acetic acid. Moreover; the possibility to distinguish wine samples on the base of permitted levels of fault compounds content was shown.