Lindstrom defines Small Data "as seemingly insignificant observations you identify in consumers’ homes, is everything from how you place your shoes on how you hang your paintings".
“As you enter their store, they have now created an amazing community where every staff member acts in a character mood, based on Small Data”.
Researchers at Cornell University started developing applications to monitor health problems in patients, based on small data.
Other apps developed also include monitoring online grocery shopping, to use this information from every user to adapt their groceries to the recommendations of nutritionists, or monitoring email language to identify patterns that might indicate "fluctuations in cognitive performance, fatigue, side effects of medication or poor sleep, and other conditions and treatments that are typically self-reported and self-medicated".
By combining this technology with its small data sample of US zip codes, the USPS can now process more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour.
Currently, there is no standardized procedure to document maintenance logs leading to small but highly unstructured data sets.
However, with AI and a narrow data set of common aircraft maintenance terminology, it becomes possible to dynamically translate these logs in real time.