Apparatus and associated methods relate to a networked system having a master and multiple slaves, where each slave stores a unique (actual) slave address and a non-unique (virtual) slave address in memory, such that each slave is configured to respond to request messages addressed to the slave's non-unique slave address if a sensor device associated with the is in an active state when the slave receives the request message. In an illustrative example, the networked system may be a Fieldbus-style network (e.g., a network implementing the Modbus protocol). A sensor device may be a break-beam, capacitive touch, or push-button device, for example. An output indicator/actuator may be associated with a sensor device to indicate the status of the sensor device to a user. A networked system implementing sensor-activated response gating may beneficially expand the number of slave devices on the network while achieving low latency response times.