Wireless gas detection with a smartphone via rf communication

This paper describes the first example of an adaption of near-field communication (NFC) technology—in 0.5 billion modern smartphones and mobile devices installed in 2014—toward portable, wireless, non-line-of-sight gas phase chemical sensing. We demonstrate the ability to convert inexpensive commercial NFC tags into chemical sensors that detect and discriminate analytes at part-per-thousand and part-per-million concentrations. This effort merges rational design of conductive nanostructured materials for selective chemical sensing with portable and widely distributed NFC technology to deliver a new method of acquiring chemical information about an NFC tag's local environment. This paper introduces a concept for distributed chemical sensing by the growing number of people that carry NFC-enabled smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices.