Professor Youhong Tang, of Flinders University, Australia and Professor Dan Ding, from Nankai University, PR China were joint guest editors of a special edition of Materials Chemistry Frontiers on luminogenic bioprobes for personal health technologies.

Professors Ding and Tang are the respective Chinese and Australian Project Managers on the Australia-China Centre for Personal Health Technologies.

Personal health technologies offer to empower healthy choices, manage personal care, identify health conditions early in their course and optimise visits to health professionals However, these widespread technologies are still limited by the narrow scope of health indicators they detect. They are yet to leverage our proven understanding of pathology and integrate sophisticated biosensors that measure health markers from bodily fluids such as blood, saliva, urine and sweat. They are yet to truly realise the benefits from consumers taking daily measures of vital, well-evidenced health indicators that inform their personal health and can be analysed to give insights into population health.

The Australia-China Joint Centre for Personal Health Technologies lead by Flinders University and Nankai University and partnering with La Trobe University, South China University of Technology, Shandong Academy of Sciences, Motherson Innovations and AIEgen Biotech tries to break down disciplinary boundaries, leverage unique capabilities from China and Australia, and foster collaborative research to advance developments in an exciting new technology area, aggregation-induced emission luminogens (AIEgens), and apply it to personal health. Organized by this Joint Research Centre, this web theme showcases the most recent and important research findings in luminogenic bioprobes for personal health technologies, especially emerging AIEgen based bioprobes.

The special edition can be found online here.