Motion sickness is something that affects millions of people throughout the year, with it generally a condition that afflicts passengers in the vehicle rather than the driver. In other words, if your primarily engaged in looking out of the window, then it’s something you’re more prone to suffer from.
New research from the University of Michigan explores whether autonomous transportation, which promises to make us all passengers, is likely to coincide with an increase in motion sickness.
“One of the great promises of autonomous vehicles—to give us back time by freeing us from driving—is at risk if we can’t solve the motion sickness problem,” the researchers say. “If it’s not mitigated in some way, motion sickness may affect people’s willingness to adopt driverless cars.”
Resolving motion sickness
The researchers managed to create a robust and reliable testing mechanism to evaluate various driving maneuvers and their likely impact on passenger sickness. This in itself is a novel exercise, as our understanding of what causes motion sickness today is not well understood.
What has been done has focused excessively on eliciting a vomiting response, which is perhaps at the extreme end of a spectrum whereby comfort levels are a more realistic and useful barometer. Can people maintain useful behaviors? Is work or other productive uses of one’s time feasible?
The researchers put a number of volunteers through various standard driving maneuvers at the Mcity Test Facility at the University of Michigan. This included a 20 minute test drive, including 25 braking events, 45 left turns and 30 right turns. Volunteers were required to operate a mini-iPad to research restaurant reviews, check the news and use local maps. Volunteers were quizzed on things such as reading comprehension and pattern recognition.
Sensors were also fitted to the vehicle to measure their location and acceleration, while each volunteer was also equipped with sensors to gauge their sweat, skin temperature and heart rate.
This allowed a motion sickness scale of 1-10 to be developed, with 0 being no motion sickness and 10 indicating a need to stop the vehicle. The team hope that the index will not only give automakers a better understanding of motion sickness for vehicles in operation today, but how driverless cars can brake and accelerate to ensure passengers remain able to perform routine tasks whilst in the vehicle.
“We have found that passenger responses are complicated and have many dimensions,” the researchers say. “Applications of this testbed will result in the data we need to identify preventative measures and alleviate motion sickness in autonomous vehicles.”
