Exploring extended reality for diabetes education & self-management – A bibliometric analysis from 1999 to 2023

Background

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) has emerged as a rapidly growing non-communicable disease (NCD) across developed & developing countries. People with diabetes mellitus experience health implications. They develop associated microvascular complications such as neuropathy, nephropathy & retinopathy and macro-vascular complications like coronary artery disease, stroke, amputations etc. These complications increase the socio-economic burden of people living with diabetes. Self-management of diabetes through education is a strong tool that remains under-utilized in clinical settings. The objective of the present study was to explore the role of extended reality for diabetes education & self-management.

Methodology

The present study is a bibliometric analysis performed on the Scopus database with keywords: diabetes education, self-management, extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and Boolean operators AND, OR. The search period ranged from inception till 4^th July 2023 with restriction to English language articles. A total of 89 documents were identified in Scopus under multiple domains such as Engineering, Medicine, Health Professions, Nursing among others. The data was exported to the VOS Viewer software for network analysis.

Results

Out of the total 89 documents, 45-original research, 26-review, 12-conference paper, 3-book, 2-book chapters & 1-note. The highest publications were from the Medicine category. The year of publication of the included documents ranged from 1999 till 2022. The network analysis was performed to explore the association between the included studies (co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation analysis, bibliographic coupling).

Conclusion

The network analysis found the USA to be the leading publisher and the National Institute of Health (NIH) to be the leading funding source. There is limited evidence and a strong future scope to strengthen research productivity on extended reality for diabetes education & self-management.