A Survey on the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality-based Therapy and Pain Management

Virtual reality refers to the technology used to create multi-sensory three-dimensional environments that can be navigated, manipulated, and interacted by a user. This paper’s objective is to categorize the most common areas that use virtual reality (VR) for managing pain (psychological and physical). To our knowledge, this is the first survey that summarizes all of these areas in one place. This paper reviews the conducted studies that used VR for psychological treatment, especially with phobias. Also, this paper summarizes the current literature on using virtual reality interventions for managing acute, chronic, and cancer pain. Based on the review, virtual reality shows great potential for controlling acute pain - such as pain associated with burn wound care. However, limited studies only investigated the impact of using virtual reality on patients with chronic pain. The findings indicated that VR distraction has a great impact on pain and distress related to cancer and its treatments. This paper also discusses the challenges and limitations of the current research. Notably, the identified studies recommend VR distraction as a promising adjunct for pain reduction and psychological treatment. However, further research needs to be conducted to determine under what conditions VR distraction will provide more analgesic effects.