Humidity sensing systems: from manufacturing to intelligent perception applications

Abstract As a key physical quantity of environmental monitoring, humidity plays an irreplaceable role in agricultural production, health monitoring and extreme environmental detection. However, the limitations of traditional humidity sensing systems in response speed, environmental adaptability, and information analysis capabilities have made it difficult to meet the high-order requirements of modern applications for real-time, reliability, and intelligence. This bottleneck is driving a profound change in humidity sensing technology—its development focus has shifted from the improvement of single device performance to the construction of intelligent sensing systems with information understanding and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This perspective paper outlines the evolution path of humidity sensing technology from manufacturing to intelligent sensing. Firstly, the performance boundary of humidity sensor devices based on different humidity sensitive materials is analyzed. Furthermore, the technical trend of constructing intelligent sensor nodes through system integration is discussed, and the enabling mechanism of artificial intelligence algorithm in realizing intelligent applications such as health monitoring, human-computer interaction and intelligent agriculture is emphatically explained. Finally, the current challenges in sensitivity, stability, power consumption and signal analysis are pointed out, and the future development opportunities are prospected, in order to provide theoretical support and technical path for promoting the transition of humidity sensing from detection to cognition.