Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly adopted as a digital tool in rehabilitation for balance training, coordination improvement, and motor recovery, yet the literature remains dispersed across clinical rehabilitation, exercise-based interventions, and broader motor-related applications. This fragmentation makes it difficult to determine how the field has evolved and where research emphasis has shifted....
No actionable change — this is a bibliometric mapping study that describes publication trends rather than providing clinical evidence to guide VR rehabilitation practice.
Understanding where VR rehabilitation research is concentrated — and where it is fragmented — can help guide future study design and highlight gaps relevant to vestibular and balance rehabilitation in audiology.
- 01Bibliometric + topic-modeling analysis mapped the VR balance/motor rehabilitation literature.
- 02Research in this area is highly dispersed across disciplines with no dominant cluster.
- 03Topic modeling identified thematic groupings within a scattered literature base.
- 04Findings highlight the need for more coordinated, cross-disciplinary research efforts.
- 05Peripheral relevance to audiology via vestibular rehabilitation applications of VR.
Research on virtual reality for balance, coordination, and motor rehabilitation is dispersed across disciplines.
studysupported- PMID
- 42072967
- DOI
- 10.3390/healthcare14081067.
- Journal
- Healthcare
- Publication type
- review
- Evidence level
- na
- Population
- Published literature on VR for balance, coordination, and motor rehabilitation (no human participants directly)
- Intervention
- Bibliometric and topic-modeling analysis of VR rehabilitation literature
Primary outcomes
Mapping of publication trends in VR balance/motor rehabilitation research; Identification of thematic topic clusters via topic modeling