Editorial for the Special Issue on Advances in Capacitive Sensors

摘要

Capacitive sensors are an active research area with multiple advantages and great applicability. Their numerous benefits, such as simple structure, cost-effectiveness, low power consumption, low noise performance, reliability, and high adaptability to the environment, have made them very suitable for the measurement of many physical and chemical magnitudes. They are used in a wide variety of applications, from tactile sensors, flexible human–computer interfaces, artificial muscles, wearable systems and electronic skin to material property monitoring, food inspection, or biological sensing, among others. Detection mechanisms can be based on changes in the sensor geometry or in variations of the dielectric properties of a sensing layer. Therefore, in addition to many proposals of new innovative geometries, there is also much research work on advanced materials and nanostructures based on them, as well as on fabrication technologies, such as those based on microsystems or additive techniques. All of these aspects make capacitive sensors a very interdisciplinary research area that motivates launching this Special Issue on Advances in Capacitive Sensors, with the aim of collecting papers from structures or systems based on novel geometries, fabrication procedures, innovative materials, and even measurement techniques. This Special Issue includes five original research papers, representative of the various aspects mentioned above, and a review paper.