Recent Progress and Trends in Water Pollutant Monitoring with Smart Devices

Pollution, climate change, and overexploitation have led to severe water stress worldwide. According to the United Nations, 2.2 billion people today lack access to safely managed drinking water. Once water is contaminated, removing the pollutants becomes costly and often impossible. Several types of pollutants can be present in freshwater, including pathogens, organic matter, heavy metals, and, more recently, emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals. Ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water is thus crucial, as pollution can impact human uses and other wildlife. This chapter critically summarizes the state of the art concerning the use of new portable assays for pollutant detection and the monitoring of some water physical and chemical parameters such as temperature and pH, focusing on 2019—the beginning of 2023. We stressed that using a wireless sensor network is efficient for quasi-instantaneous water quality monitoring. The near future will probably be oriented toward the use of wearable systems that provide ultra-simple and on-site detection of any type of pollutant.