Virtual reality a technological miracle transforming physical rehabilitation: A scoping review

Physical rehabilitation is evolving day by day. In the same way, simulation in rehabilitation is increasing and has now become a cornerstone for rehabilitation programs. Increase in the number of new protocols, clinical methods, and treatment standardization, virtual reality is appearing as a new medium to deliver the simulation. Virtual reality gives the benefits of forming standardized treatment protocols on demand for various conditions repetitively with a cost-effective delivery system. This was an observational retrospective study. The PubMed database was used to obtain the available material related to virtual reality and rehabilitation and was searched using the same keywords. The articles were then sorted as the subject to the recent decade. The basic information was then obtained, which included timespan, sources of the document, average years of publication, document types we collected, and average citation per year per document. Analysis of the literature that was available online related to virtual reality and rehabilitation between 2011 and 2021 generated a list of 813 documents from 275 sources, of which 810 were from journal articles and 3 were book chapters with an average year of publication of 2.16. The highest number of publications was 480 in 2020, followed by 150 in 2019, 95 in 2018, and 28 in 2017. The annual growth rate percentage of scientific publications was 26.1%. Therefore, more studies should be performed on virtual reality.