That's right, data mining can be used to help smell. Coors, Evian and Starbucks use electronic noses to test the quality of their products. There's even promise for electric noses in a field called telemedicine.
Electronic noses are really just sophisticated sensors that create a digital fingerprint of a smell.
Long a lab-bound technique, it's now moving into the marketplace, and according to Technical Insights publisher Peter Katz, has the potential to be as big. Admittedly the current market resembles The Gibson Girl's nose more than Jimmy Durante's. But recent advances, such as the use of neural networks and data mining, have opened up a wide range of new applications, he explains, while at the same time the cost of manufacturing electronic noses has been falling. Straight data mining. As a result, artificial neural networks, which have been used to analyze complex data and to recognize patterns, are showing promising results in chemical vapor recognition.