I currently believe that quotemeta will work within the context of a double-quoted argument with the Bourne shell. I was concerned mostly with ensuring that any quotes embedded in $sensor would not terminate the quoted argument early (I suspect that some of the $sensor values contain characters that separate commands) and quotemeta seems to be a tool usable for this special case. If I am wrong, please provide a counter-example where quotemeta fails to cause a string to be passed exactly as written as an argument. That code was written off the top of my head and not tested so I could be very wrong here...

In this case, it is wrong anyway because $sensor consists of multiple arguments that the shell is expected to split, and I did immediately suggest finding a solution that does not involve using the shell after an example input was provided.