Rehabilitation plays a crucial role in cancer care, as the functioning of cancer survivors is frequently compromised by impairments that can result from the disease itself but also from the long-term sequelae of the treatment. Nevertheless, the current literature shows that only a minority of patients receive physical and/or cognitive rehabilitation. This lack of rehabilitative care is a consequence of many factors, one of which includes the transportation issues linked to disability that limit the patient’s access to rehabilitation facilities. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further shown the benefits of improving telemedicine and home-based rehabilitative interventions to facilitate the delivery of rehabilitation programs when attendance at healthcare facilities is an obstacle. In recent years, researchers have been investigating the benefits of the application of virtual reality to rehabilitation. Virtual reality is shown to improve adherence and training intensity through gamification, allow the replication of real-life scenarios, and stimulate patients in a multimodal manner. In our present work, we offer an overview of the present literature on virtual reality-implemented cancer rehabilitation. The existence of wide margins for technological development allows us to expect further improvements, but more randomized controlled trials are needed to confirm the hypothesis that VRR may improve adherence rates and facilitate telerehabilitation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.