Fabrication of disposable electrochemical devices using silver ink and office paper

Disposable electrochemical devices are widely used nowadays for in-field applications. This paper reports a novel and simple approach to fabricate a three-electrode configuration electrochemical cell using office paper instead of chromatographic paper. This approach combined established wax printing, office paper, and silver ink to transform the office paper into an electrochemical device, thus decreasing the cost of fabrication by 96.7% compared to that using chromatographic paper. Moreover, we demonstrated that the office-paper electrochemical device is suitable for the quantification of different analytes (e.g., heavy metal ions, halides, and explosives) in aqueous solutions. The manufacturing process shown here is extremely cost-efficient and uses off-the-shelf products.