The Food and Drug Administration has revealed potential vulnerabilities in St. Jude Medical's implantable cardiac devices. The agency on Monday confirmed flaws in the Merlin@home Transmitter, leaving embedded pacemakers and defibrillators open to attack. According to the FDA, an unauthorized user could remotely access a patient's radio frequency-enabled implant, then modify programming commands to quickly deplete the battery or administer inappropriate pacing or shocks.

Apple’s Siri has been around five years, but Amazon’s Alexa is the coolest kid on the voice- computing block now. At least, so it seemed at this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where many manufacturers touted their Alexa functionality as a major selling point for 35 new product introductions, including a car, refrigerator, smartphone, robot, Internet router and vacuum cleaner. “There’s a real hunger for the next big thing,” says Benedict Evans, a partner with investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. “It was Web apps, then bots, and now it’s voice interfaces.”

Business Insider tells the story of how Amazon's Echo made Alexa the most successful smart voice assistant at home, and, now, how Google, Microsoft, and Apple are trying to catch up in the burgeoning smartphone speaker marketplace. “In 2016, the Amazon Echo line of devices appeared to have a great sales year, with the cheap Echo Dot smart speaker finishing out the holiday shopping season as the best-selling item on all of Amazon.com,” it writes.

Employers across Britain and North America are fitting their staff with wearable tracker devices to monitor their fitness, productivity and stress levels 24 hours a day. At least four companies - including a major bank and part of the NHS - are using 'sociometric badges' to measure the conditions of their staff. The credit card-sized devices created by Humanyze include a microphone that analyses the tone, speed and volume, but not the content, of a person's voice, scan for proximity to others and measure physical activity and sleep patterns.

Azek, a provider of building materials, has released a new virtual reality application that lets consumers visually build and explore rooms with Azek products before they go and purchase them. The new program takes advantage of both virtual reality and augmented reality to let consumer see their deck being built in real time. Once the virtual deck has been assembled, the pieces used can be easily purchased through the app.

Staples is "prioritizing innovation as a key catalyst to further differentiate Staples from the competition," according to CEO Shira Goodman. The company began alpha testing of its Easy System during its third quarter 2016 with a handful of contract customers and plans to do a broader beta test to more than a 100 customers by year-end. Staples’ Easy System is an example of applying technology to drive innovation for a truly easy customer experience.

Google unveiled its latest self-driving system in a Chrysler Pacifica minivan during a Sunday preview ahead of the Detroit auto show, saying the technology is more reliable and affordable. The announcement came from John Krafcik, head of Google's Waymo unit, whose search for partners to develop and install the company's autonomous driving technology into real cars has so far yielded only an alliance with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles  and a pending deal with Honda Motor Co. Headlining a future mobility conference during the show's media preview, Krafcik said Waymo's latest set of self-driving hardware and software incorporated a new array of sensors, …

A European Parliament committee has voted in favor of a draft report that proposes granting legal status to robots, categorizing them as “electronic persons”. The draft report, approved by 17 votes to two and two abstentions by the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs, proposes that “The most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause.”

Monday marked the start of a $2 billion Dallas trial that emerged from a lawsuit by video game company ZeniMax, alleging that Facebook-owned Oculus VR stole some of its key technology and promoted a fake origin story to hide the truth. Facebook, which acquired Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, denies the claims, which could lead CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify in court. In court documents, ZeniMax said Facebook purchased Oculus with “full awareness” that some of its core intellectual property, namely the software and hardware for Oculus’ virtual reality goggles, was stolen from …

Ford has been hosting hackathons in service to its Sync AppLink smartphone application connectivity technology, and they have already paid dividends in the form of experiments with brands such as IBM Watson.   The Sync AppLink technology has done wonders for opening up Ford’s vehicles to applications for connected platforms, including mobile payments for fuel, navigation, wearables integration and other capabilities. Many of the varied usages of the Sync AppLink tech emerged as products of partnerships with high-profile brands, such as ExxonMobil, Samsung, DriverScore and Dash Radio.