Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Introduction Individuals with chronic physical illness are at increased risk of negative psychological sequelae. Immersive virtual reality (VR) is an emerging treatment that might reduce these negative effects and increase quality of life in individuals with chronic physical illness.
Objective To systematically review literature examining the use of immersive VR in adult populations with chronic physical illness to understand: (1) how immersive VR is used to improve psychological well-being of adults with chronic physical illness (2) what effect this immersive VR has on the psychological well-being of adults with chronic physical illness.
Design Systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Searches of Ovid Medline/PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, Web of Science and Scopus between July 1993 and March 2023 inclusive.
Results 12 811 texts were identified; 31 met the inclusion criteria. Relaxing and engaging immersive VR interventions were shown to be acceptable and feasible among adults with cancer, dementia, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and multiple sclerosis. Many of the studies reviewed were feasibility or pilot studies and so the evidence about effectiveness is more limited. The evidence, mostly from studies of people with cancer, suggests that immersive VR can have a positive effects on anticipatory anxiety symptoms and pain.
Conclusions Environment-based and game-based relaxing immersive VR offer novel interventions, with beneficial effects among people with cancer and, potentially, beneficial effects in those with other long-term physical illness.
- Chronic conditions
- Cancer
- Psychological care
Data availability statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article.
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Data availability statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article.
Supplementary materials
Supplementary Data
This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.
Footnotes
Contributors All authors contributed to the study design. WRGMG, CJD and RF designed and executed the search strategy. WRGMG, CJD, AA and MD screened abstracts, extracted data and assessed evidence quality. WRGMG and MD analysed and interpreted the data. All authors provided feedback and revisions to the manuscript. All authors approved the final version for submission. MD is the guarantor.
Funding The research was completed with the support of funding from the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trust (HSCNI) Business Services Organisation (BSO).
Disclaimer The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the HSCNI or the BSO.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.