Light‐Emitting Diodes as Wireless Optical Transducers of Chemical Information

The synergy of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and bipolar electrochemistry has been explored to develop novel and straightforward optical readouts of chemical information. These approaches offer the possible encoding of the chemical information on the intensity of the light emission, opening multiple applications ranging from electroanalysis to dynamic systems and multimodal imaging.

Optical readouts have gained a considerable attention due to their high spatial resolution, high signal to noise ratio and fast response times. Among these, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as optical transducers enable to encode chemical information in the current passing through the diode and as a consequence in its light emission amplitude. Recently, the synergy between the principle of bipolar electrochemistry and the optical and electric advantages of LEDs have been explored, in order to develop novel and straightforward approaches to visualize chemical information. This has been increasingly exploited in multiple applications ranging from electroanalysis to chiral recognition, dynamic systems, and multimodal imaging. This review aims to highlight the use of endogenous (thermodynamically spontaneous) and exogenous (externally driven) bipolar electrochemistry for the design of wireless optical readouts based on the operating principle of LEDs.

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