An employee at Vaisala holds a gas-sensor component that is being manufactured in the company’s clean room.Credit: Vaisala
Neuroscientist Tamara Stawicki woke abruptly to her mobile phone ringing shortly after 1 a.m. on 24 August 2025. After a brief conversation, Stawicki got out of bed and drove to a quiet car park. Casual observers might have wondered what she was up to as she strode purposefully into an imposing building at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, still wearing her pyjamas.
Nature Spotlight: Sensors
In fact, Stawicki was on a mission to save the lives of around 1,000 zebrafish (Danio rerio) in her laboratory. Similarities between lines of hair cells on the fish’s flanks and those in the mammalian inner ear enable her to use them as a model to study hearing problems in humans caused by some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs. A sensor had picked up that the lab’s heating system had been knocked out by a power fault, triggering the call from campus security that put Stawicki in a race against time to protect the fish.
Sensors, like the one in Stawicki’s lab, have become commonplace. Lab managers investing in technology are more likely to be upgrading their current system than installing one for the first time. “Twenty years ago, monitoring labs remotely was seen as a luxury, whereas now many are on their second- or third-generation systems, so people have a better understanding of what information they can gather and what they can do with it,” says Han Weerdesteyn, chief commercial officer at XiltriX in Rosmalen, the Netherlands, which sells such systems.
Although researchers and their technical colleagues might know what to expect from a sensor system, there is still plenty for them to consider if they decide to upgrade. Do they, for example, just want to make a one-off purchase of hardware and software, or do they also want to subscribe to ongoing related services? Will new systems integrate with other technologies that they already use or interfere with them? And what about maintenance, technical support, data security, storage requirements and the need to calibrate sensors to ensure they are accurate?
Robots demonstrate principles of collective intelligence
Almost all labs already have sensors as part of building-management systems used to monitor and control heating, ventilation, air conditioning, power, lighting and security. The sensors used by researchers to keep track of their work remotely are sometimes described as environmental monitoring systems. Among the most widely used are those that measure relative humidity, light, room occupancy, differential pressure and gas quantities. Others can detect motion, open doors, whether the equipment is on, the presence of water or battery status.
Temperature sensors are bestsellers for companies that supply academic and industry labs: “Whether research is on physical materials, chemical reactions or biological systems, the outputs or behaviours are usually dependent on temperature, so devices that measure temperature are the most common sensors in labs,” says Hannu Talvitie, a technology strategist at Vaisala, a measurement-equipment company in Vantaa, Finland.
In some labs, data from sensors are still gathered manually, however this is time-consuming and might mean that problems are not spotted until it is too late. Increasingly, sensors automatically transmit information to a central hub through either wired or wireless networks. Software analyses the data, transforms it into user-friendly charts, graphs or dashboards, and uploads it to the cloud so it is accessible through phone apps or web platforms, triggering emergency alerts if necessary.
... continue reading