The Pros And Cons Of Virtual Physical Therapy

Is virtual reality effective at treating physical disabilities?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 100 billion people have some form of a physical impairment, of which over 110 million suffer significant difficulties in functioning [1]. As a result, many therapeutic interventions have been used and tested to help physically impaired people to regain their motor skills and return to their normal lives. One popular intervention is physical therapy, which is a rehabilitation program that utilizes physical methods to develop, maintain, and restore the person’s movement and physical function impaired by a disease, injury or disability (also known as Physiotherapy). A high dose of repetitive physical therapy is needed for an

Several small-scale studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of VR training in improving balance. Ilona and her colleagues have summarized the results of twenty-one of them, which demonstrated a significant improvement of VR therapy on balance recovery compared to conventional ones as indicated by the most frequent motor quality measures: Gait Speed, Berg Balance Scale, and Timed “Up & Go” Test [9]. Further large-scale studies are recommended before reaching any conclusions, but virtual reality therapy seems to have a positive promising effect on balance

Standard pain control measures such as the use of pain relievers have proven to be inadequate in treating this pain [10]. As a result, a lot of research has been done to develop a solution to this problem, and more recently, virtual reality has been suggested as a promising one. Virtual reality, theoretically speaking, might help distract the user from any pain by drawing heavily upon their conscious attention, thus leaving fewer cognitive resources to evaluate the feeling of pain. A wide range of case studies on this topic suggests that immersive virtual reality has a significant effect in reducing pain in physical therapy procedures [11]. One example of such study was done on a 32-year old male, where he reported 47% decrease on the time he spent thinking about pain while he was in VR compared to when he did a standard therapy with no VR intervention (Figure 2). Another larger in scale study done on fifty-four subjects aged from 6-19 years old provides further evidence that interaction with VR helps control procedural pain during therapy [10]. The results (Figure 3) shows a significant decrease in the severity and the time spent thinking about pain when the subjects were experiencing the virtual world. Moreover,