Figure 1 presents a flowchart of the selection process. Through the electronic and manual literature search, we identified a total of 438 articles. After removing duplicates, we reviewed the titles and abstracts of 172 studies to assess their eligibility; subsequently, 40 were considered to be relevant for full-text assessment. The final sample comprised 30 RCTs [8,9,10,11,12, 37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61], which were published between 2012 and 2024.

Flowchart of study selection. PEDro Physiotherapy Evidence Database

Table 1 summarizes the study characteristics and demographic data of the participants with stoke in the included RCTs. In total, 1,621 participants who had a diagnosis of stroke with hemiplegia (or hemiparesis) were recruited, with a mean age of 60.4 years (range: 43.0–77.0 years). Twelve RCTs [42,43,44,45, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57,58,59,60] enrolled people with stroke who had acute onset stroke from a few days to 3 months, whereas the other 6 RCTs [9, 46, 51, 55, 56, 61] and 12 RCTs [8, 10,11,12, 30, 37,38,39,40,41, 50, 52] enrolled people with stroke in the subacute (disease duration: < 6 months) and chronic stage (mean disease duration: 6–100 months), respectively.

Most of the included RCTs used VT as an adjunct therapy with SR [8, 10, 11, 37,38,39,40, 42,43,44,45,46,47,48, 50,51,52,53,54, 56,57,58, 60, 61] or other active treatments [12, 40, 41, 55, 59], whereas 6 RCTs [8, 9, 30, 42, 59, 61] used VT as monotherapy. Most of the included RCTs conducted an immediate or short-term follow-up within 3 months, four RCTs had a medium-term follow-up duration of 12–18 weeks [10, 12, 37, 56], and only one RCT had a long-term follow-up period of 6 months [37].

A summary of the protocols for VT is presented in Table 1, and details of the protocol for VT are presented in Supplementary Table 2. Regarding the vibration mode, most of the included RCTs used FMV [10,11,12, 30, 38,39,40,41,42,43,