Virtual Reality Aided Therapy towards Health 4.0: A Two-Decade Bibliometric Analysis.

Zhen Liu,Ke Zhang,Chang Xiao,Peter Demian,Lingfeng Ren

doi:10.3390/ijerph19031525

Abstract

Health 4.0 aligns with Industry 4.0 and encourages the application of the latest technologies to healthcare. Virtual reality (VR) is a potentially significant component of the Health 4.0 vision. Though VR in health care is a popular topic, there is little knowledge of VR-aided therapy from a macro perspective. Therefore, this paper was aimed to explore the research of VR in aiding therapy, thus providing a potential guideline for futures application of therapeutic VR in healthcare towards Health 4.0. A mixed research method was adopted for this research, which comprised the use of a bibliometric analysis (a quantitative method) to conduct a macro overview of VR-aided therapy, the identification of significant research structures and topics, and a qualitative review of the literature to reveal deeper insights. Four major research areas of VR-aided therapy were identified and investigated, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and fear related disorder (A&F), diseases of the nervous system (DNS), and pain management, including related medical conditions, therapies, methods, and outcomes. This study is the first to use VOSviewer, a commonly used software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks and developed by Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands, to conduct bibliometric analyses on VR-aided therapy from the perspective of Web of Science core collection (WoSc), which objectively and visually shows research structures and topics, therefore offering instructive insights for health care stakeholders (particularly researchers and service providers) such as including integrating more innovative therapies, emphasizing psychological benefits, using game elements, and introducing design research. The results of this paper facilitate with achieving the vision of Health 4.0 and illustrating a two-decade (2000 to year 2020) map of pre-life of the Health Metaverse.

Highlights

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being [1] that has been given particular attention following the establishment of the Millennium DevelopmentGoals [2]
The network visualization of Virtual reality (VR)-aided therapy revealed that recent studies have mainly been focused on A&F and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is in line with Thurner et al.’s [178] study that indicated that psychology and psychiatry are the medical fields where VR studies are growing, suggesting that VR
The purpose of this study was to explore an overview and details of VR and therapy and to guide VR application in Health care (HC), which was achieved with the bibliometric analyses of publications from Web of Science core collection (WoSc)

Summary

Introduction

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being [1] that has been given particular attention following the establishment of the Millennium Development. In September 2015, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages [3]. There has been increasing demand for guidance regarding the pathways and resources needed to realize health-related SDGs [4]. Health care (HC) is typically considered a chief determinant to promote the health of people around the world. The share of HC in global revenue has been slowly but steadily increasing in the past few decades, and cross-country evidence has shown that health investment will return substantial health returns [5].

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