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Medtronic right this moment introduced it appointed former Amazon govt Ken Washington as chief expertise and innovation officer.

On this newly created position, Washington will leverage his intensive expertise main expertise improvement and execution throughout industries, together with robotics, shopper merchandise, automotive and house. He may also develop into a member of the Medtronic Govt Committee.

“This new management position will assist Medtronic to harness the progressive spirit of our founders and guarantee we’re capitalizing on our scientific and technological information to invent, innovate and disrupt the healthcare expertise market of the longer term,” Chair and CEO Geoff Martha stated in a information launch. “Dr. Washington will assist Medtronic develop use of our expertise platforms throughout our portfolio – together with robotics, sensors, implantables and AI – bettering our returns on investments in innovation and increasing our technological aggressive benefit to drive sturdy progress.”

Washington most just lately served as VP and GM of shopper robotics at Amazon. The corporate in late 2021 launched its Astro residence robotic, which is actually an Echo Present 10 on wheels. Amazon stated Astro can be utilized for quite a lot of issues, together with residence monitoring, videoconferencing with household and mates, entertaining kids, and all the identical options we’ve come to know and love from Alexa gadgets – hearken to music, examine your schedule, and so on.

Astro can map your private home and go to particular rooms on command. The voice-controllable robotic can acknowledge faces, ship gadgets to particular folks, after a human places the merchandise within the storage bin, and use third-party equipment to, for instance, report blood stress. It may possibly detect the sound of a smoke alarm, carbon monoxide detector or breaking glass. You probably have a Ring account, Astro can ship you notifications if it notices one thing uncommon.

Washington has additionally been the chief expertise officer at Ford Motor Co., the place he oversaw improvement of the corporate’s expertise technique, together with next-generation automobile architectures, controls and automatic methods. Washington additionally spent seven years at Lockheed Martin in quite a few management roles, together with chief expertise officer, chief privateness officer and VP of the superior expertise heart in Lockheed Martin Area Programs Firm.