Yaxiong Xie

Pesticide overuse poses significant risks to human health and environmental integrity. Addressing the limitations of existing approaches, which struggle with the diversity of pesticide compounds, portability issues, and detection efficiency, this paper introduces SpeedPest. A wireless and battery-free electrochemical tag that integrates the advantages of NFC technology with electrochemical biosensors for portable, high-accuracy, and fast multi-pesticide detection. The basic idea of SpeedPest is comparing the distinct electrochemical responses between a pair of biological receptors and different pesticides to construct a unique set of feature fingerprints to make multi-pesticide sensing feasible. To incorporate this idea within small NFC tags, we reengineer the electrochemical sensor, spanning the antenna to the voltage regulator. Additionally, to improve the system’s sensitivity and detection efficiency, we design electrode superimposed noise removal method and fast pesticide detection algorithm. Experiments with six different pesticides demonstrate that SpeedPest achieves an average accuracy of 97.78% in overall detection and 100% accuracy in concentration detection across all tested samples. Its sensitivity and rapid response remarkably outperform current state-of-the-art methods.