Product quality is one of the prime factors in ensuring consistent marketing of jackfruit. However there is no precise measurement, clear definition or standard unit to identify product quality objectively since quality is always associated with the degree of acceptance by the consumers. Qualitative evaluation of agricultural products has been of interest to many and what we call organoleptic quality could be summarized as “eating pleasure”. Many quality factors such as flavor or taste are actually related to ripeness [
1]. For jackfruit juice manufacturing industries especially, fruits received from farm should be fully ripened as to produce good quality of fruit juice. This is because only the ripened fruit has good eating quality in terms of aroma, texture, sweetness, and taste and therefore is able to produce high quality of juice. Hence monitoring and controlling fruit ripeness has become a very important issue in the fruit industry since ripeness is perceived by customers as the main quality indicator [
2]. However, until today optimal harvest dates and prediction of storage life are still mainly based on practical experience. Leaving these critical decisions to subjective interpretation implies that large quantities of fruit are harvested too soon or too late and reach manufacturers in poor condition [
3]. In most industries today, human sensory panels are still the key role of QA/QC (quality assurance/quality control) in product quality monitoring. This however when used in production facilities have been time consuming and expensive to operate. This has been attributed to reliance on-plant personnel who are subjected to typical economic and personal issues such as sickness, emotions, absenteeism, scheduling conflicts, lay offs, attrition, etc. [
4]. Given these challenges, a simple but reliable QA/QC analytical technique is highly desired by the fruit industries. The present paper is devoted to analytical evaluation of the disposable sensor strips performance for the description or monitoring of analysis pertaining to quality assurance of jackfruit.
A study towards the development of a simple but reliable, one-shot, disposable sensor strip which functions on a new concept of global selectivity is currently done by Universiti Sains Malaysia. The disposable strip, coupled with chemometric principle is capable of providing chemical fingerprint that represent a combination of all the chemical components, ideally suitable for simple, real-time testing and monitoring of jackfruit ripeness and taste. The basic principle behind the disposable sensor system is to combine non-specific and overlapping sensors signals with pattern recognition routines. The sensor array in this system produces signals, which are not specific for any particular components in the samples. The signal pattern generated is related to certain features or qualities of the sample. These qualities can be determined by a computer trained to recognize the class of response patterns related to the sample under study. This is thus a similar correlation to how the human sensing organs produce signal patterns to be qualitatively interpreted by the brain [
5]. The disposable sensor strip is a replacement to the conventional electrodes, which is bulky and expensive. The sensor array is an integration of working electrodes and reference electrode together in a single strip based on screen-printing technology, in order to miniaturize and to simplify the instrumentation for decentralized analysis. Screen-printing technology is particularly attractive for the production of disposable sensors. The ‘memory effect” between one sample to another is avoided, and the phenomenon referred to as “electrode fouling” which is one of the main drawbacks of the electrochemical sensors is overcome. As the sensor described here is targeted for one-time used, hence sterilization or cleaning to avoid contamination is no longer needed and sensor durability or usage lifetime, which is particularly important for conventional electrode, is also no longer an issue, which needed to be taken into consideration. Besides that, common problem related to conventional sensors like sensor respond drifting due to leaching of active agents in the membrane is also overcome as the membrane sensor is always new prior to use [
6].