Advances in plastic optical fiber bio/chemical sensors to realize point-of-care-tests

The characteristics of Plastic Optical Fibers (POFs) are exploited to realize simple, highly sensitive, and low-cost bio/chemical sensors via innovative schemes. The POF's multimode characteristic and the simple modification processes are used to obtain novel ultra-sensitive platforms that can be combined with different kinds of receptors (bio-mimetic or biological receptors) to detect specific substances in different ranges for several application fields. This review reports several POF platforms based on different optical transduction principles obtained via low-cost setups, such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR), localized SPR, lossy mode resonance, evanescent wave, and others. The reported sensor configurations are useful to understand how the balance of the combination of these two components (POF platforms and receptors) can produce the desired optimal performance of the POF-based bio/chemical sensor in terms of substance and detection range.