Case Study: Avatarion Technology keeps hospitalized children connected and enables predictive maintenance with Microsoft Azure

Developers at Avatarion Deploy Robots to Entertain Lonely Children in Hospitals

Avatarion Technology AG (Switzerland) created Avatar Kids to help hospitalized children stay connected with home and school, piloting the service in six hospitals with 25 robots. The challenge was a lack of telemetry and remote interaction—no near-real-time insight into robot usage, errors, battery status or location—so the team couldn't prove effectiveness or intervene proactively.

The company implemented Azure IoT Hub for secure, bidirectional PaaS messaging (using the IoT REST API from Pepper and Nao robots and Xamarin apps on tablets), enabling a cockpit with near-real-time monitoring, message retention and decoupled processing. Telemetry now feeds Azure Machine Learning for predictive maintenance, and the team is exploring Cognitive Services, LUIS, Bot Framework and speech APIs to improve interaction and scale the program.

Avatarion Technology

Jean Christophe Gostanian

CEO