Virtual Reality Rehabilitation Helps to Improve Postural Balance in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Randomized Control Trial.

Children with autism spectrum disorder often struggle with balance and adapting to changing physical demands, so physiotherapists are interested in whether newer tools like virtual reality can add anything to standard balance training. This trial compared non-immersive virtual reality combined with traditional physiotherapy against traditional physiotherapy alone in 53 children aged 7 to 12, over a 12-week program, using the pediatric balance scale and a instrumented balance testing system called the Biodex balance system. Both groups improved on balance scale scores and showed reduced sway (a measure of postural instability) after treatment compared to before. When the two groups were compared directly, the virtual reality group showed significantly better results across all measures.

The main limitation is that this is one moderately sized trial, so while the comparison is encouraging for the specific combination tested, it has not yet been replicated across other settings or larger groups of children with autism spectrum disorder.

If your child has autism spectrum disorder, you may already know that balance and coordination can be an area of difficulty. Researchers wanted to find out whether adding virtual reality games to regular physiotherapy sessions would help more than physiotherapy on its own. In this trial, 53 children aged 7 to 12 were split into two groups: one did virtual reality training alongside traditional physiotherapy, the other did traditional physiotherapy alone, for 12 weeks.

Both groups showed improvements in balance measures afterward. But when researchers compared the two groups directly, the children who also did virtual reality training showed better results across all the balance tests used.

This is a single, moderately sized study, so while the results point toward virtual reality being a useful addition, more research in other groups of children would help confirm whether this holds true more broadly.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This trial addresses whether non-immersive virtual reality training adds measurable benefit to traditional physiotherapy for postural balance in children with autism spectrum disorder, compared to traditional physiotherapy alone. Over 12 weeks, both the virtual reality plus physiotherapy group and the physiotherapy-only group (53 children total, aged 7 to 12) showed statistically significant within-group improvements in pediatric balance scale scores and reductions in overall sway index and Biodex-tested balance conditions.

Critically, post-intervention between-group comparisons favored the virtual reality group across all outcome measures (p < 0.05). For clinicians weighing whether virtual reality tools are worth incorporating into balance-focused sessions for this population, this trial offers a specific between-group comparison supporting an added effect beyond traditional physiotherapy alone, rather than evidence that virtual reality works in isolation. The main limitation is that this is a single randomised trial of modest size, so the magnitude and consistency of the between-group advantage across different clinical settings and virtual reality systems remains to be established through replication.