Avatar robot goes to school for ill German boy-[PHOTOS]

Joshua Martinangeli, 7, is too ill to go to school but the German student can still interact with his teacher and classmates through an avatar robot that sits in class in his place and sends a blinking signal when he has something to say.

"Joshi can see the classroom and he can talk to the children. He can see everything on an iPad at home," Ute Winterberg, headmistress at the Pusteblume-Grundschule in Berlin, told Reuters in an interview.

Joshua cannot attend classes because he wears a tube in his neck due to a severe lung disease, said his mother, Simone Martinangeli.

"Joshua has a tracheotomy. When Joshua was one year old he had to be operated on and we were told either he goes into a three-month deep coma or he'll have a tracheotomy for at least two years."

The avatar project is a private initiative paid for by the local council in Berlin's Marzahn-Hellersdorf district.

The robot representing Joshua in his Berlin classroom is made by Norway's No Isolation company founded in 2015 with the goal "to reduce loneliness and social isolation through warm technologies."