Virtual Reality Technology in Otolaryngology Patient Care Management: A Narrative Review of Current Evidence and Future Prospects

The review organizes otolaryngology VR applications into patient-facing and nurse-facing categories, with the former covering preoperative education, pain and anxiety relief, vestibular rehabilitation, swallowing assessment and therapy, hearing rehabilitation, and tinnitus management, and the latter covering professional training and skills development. Relative to prior literature focused on a single indication or technical step, this review uses the nursing care pathway as its frame to consolidate VR applications scattered across otolaryngology subspecialties into one evidence map. This is a narrative-review synthesis based on the authors' consolidation of recent clinical studies and technological advances, without quantitative pooling.

Evidence strength differs markedly across VR applications: vestibular rehabilitation is supported by strong evidence from randomized controlled trials, whereas swallowing therapy and tinnitus management are supported primarily by preliminary exploratory studies. This stratification signals that the overall effect of VR in otolaryngology should not be treated as a homogeneous conclusion but assessed indication by indication. The text states that "Vestibular rehabilitation is supported by strong evidence from randomized controlled trials" and that swallowing and tinnitus are "primarily supported by preliminary exploratory studies."

The review identifies technical, economic, and clinical factors hindering VR implementation and offers practical recommendations for future research and clinical practice. By presenting implementation barriers alongside research directions, the review moves beyond describing effects toward actionable paths forward. Based on the authors' discussion of limitations and their practical recommendations, representing expert synthesis rather than primary data.

The review highlights integration of VR with artificial intelligence, wearable biosensors, and telerehabilitation platforms as a route toward personalized remote otolaryngology nursing. It reframes VR from a standalone immersive tool into a vehicle for remote, personalized nursing services, broadening the range of imagined use scenarios. The text presents this as "recent advances" and a future direction, without clinical outcome data for the integrated model.

This review is positioned within otolaryngology nursing and is intended for clinical nurses, nursing managers, and researchers who want an overview of where VR stands in patient care and nurse training in this specialty; its conclusions are presented by indication, so the strong evidence for vestibular rehabilitation and the preliminary evidence for swallowing and tinnitus correspond to different levels of adoption confidence. The review also lists integration of VR with artificial intelligence, wearable biosensors, and telerehabilitation platforms as a direction toward personalized remote nursing, suggesting these paths are suited to settings with the relevant technical infrastructure.

Because the loaded text consists of the abstract and journal page information, the methods details, sample sizes, outcome measures, effect sizes, and figures or tables of the underlying studies are not presented, so the specific basis for the evidence stratification cannot be further verified. Readers may continue to watch how heterogeneity in study designs and outcome measures affects comparability of conclusions, how the relative weight of technical, economic, and clinical barriers differs across health systems, and what nursing outcomes follow from integrating VR with artificial intelligence, wearable biosensors, and telerehabilitation platforms.