Development of a Portable Electrochemical Platform with Chip-Integrated Gold Electrodes for Detection of Pharmaceutical Pollutants

Electrochemical portable sensing systems can offer viable support in the analysis of environmental contaminants due to the compactness of their electronic components and overall simplicity of their detection principles. In the present work, a new electrochemical portable platform (EPP) with miniaturized chip-integrated gold electrodes was developed and applied in the detection of the drug acetaminophen (APAP) as a model analyte. The produced miniaturized chip-integrated gold electrodes were first characterized via atomic force and scanning electron microscopy and integrated into the EPP, and subsequently the complete set-up was tested for electrochemical detection of APAP. The results showed adequate performance of the developed EPP when compared to a traditional electrochemical system under optimal conditions (pH 8, deposition potential 0.1 V, deposition time 240 s and scan rate of 50 mV.s−1), with a sensitivity of 1.6 μA.mM−1 and limit of detection of 67 µM. The EPP was validated in river and wastewater samples, achieving recoveries ranging from 93.0 to 96.6%.