The rising costs of healthcare and disease prevalence pose a major challenge to the availability, affordability and accessibility of high-quality care. Unserved disease markers, misdiagnosis and delayed detection remain a major challenge for health on both the individual and population level, as current lab-based diagnostics are still too slow, expensive and unfit for decentralised care.

Quality checks in food, agriculture, and related materials still rely heavily on slow, costly, and off-line laboratory analysis. This limits real-time control in production processes and contributes to inefficiencies and unnecessary food waste.

For addressing societal challenges such as the nitrogen crisis, labour shortage and high costs in health care, and labour shortage in agrifood, accurate detection of biochemicals including gases and biomarkers is essential. Yet today’s spectral sensing systems are often bulky, costly, not suitable for real-time feedback and difficult to scale, limiting their deployment outside specialised laboratory environments. In healthcare, sensors lack accuracy and robustness for complex biomarkers in the field of non-invasive monitoring.

Structural health management (SHM) of assets in defence and aerospace conventionally relies on costly ground inspections and fixed conservative maintenance schedules, leading to excessive downtime and high operational costs. There is a strong need for reliable on-board SHM monitoring solutions, able to withstand the harsh environmental conditions, to improve operational efficiency, safety and predictive maintenance.