Study: Self-driving cars will increase motion sickness…unless we retrain our brains to improve visuospatial skills

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Is brain train­ing the cure for car sick­ness? (The Sun­day Times):

RESEARCHERS from the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick think they’ve found the cure for motion sick­ness, a con­di­tion to which a third of peo­ple are high­ly sus­cep­ti­ble and from which any­one can suf­fer. The impli­ca­tions could be sig­nif­i­cant should ful­ly dri­ver­less vehi­cles become a real­i­ty, with pas­sen­gers pre­dict­ed to be more sus­cep­ti­ble to nau­sea while work­ing, read­ing or watch­ing screens dur­ing travel.

Accord­ing to the War­wick Man­u­fac­tur­ing Group (WMG), who under­took the study, “visu­ospa­tial train­ing exer­cis­es” can train the brain to reduce motion sick­ness by more than 50%. These include typ­i­cal “brain train­ing” exer­cis­es such as look­ing at a pat­tern of box­es and try­ing to match it with a rotat­ed ver­sion of the same shape, as well as paper fold­ing tasks and more.

The Study:

A nov­el method for reduc­ing motion sick­ness sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty through train­ing visu­ospa­tial abil­i­ty – A two-part study (Applied Ergonomics).

  • Abstract: Every­one can be sus­cep­ti­ble to motion sick­ness (except those with com­plete loss of labyrinth func­tion) and around one in three are known to be servery sus­cep­ti­ble. Motion sick­ness can be expe­ri­enced in many domains, includ­ing car trav­el, on a boat, using vir­tu­al real­i­ty head­sets and sim­u­la­tor use amongst oth­ers. It is expect­ed that due to poten­tial designs and use cas­es, self-dri­ving cars will increase motion sick­ness onset like­li­hood and sever­i­ty for many car trav­ellers. Besides med­ica­tion, there are lim­it­ed meth­ods through which one can active­ly reduce their motion sick­ness sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty. This research devel­ops a nov­el visu­ospa­tial train­ing tool and explores the effect of visu­ospa­tial train­ing on motion sick­ness. With a com­bined sam­ple of 42 par­tic­i­pants split between dri­ving sim­u­la­tor tri­als (n = 20), and on-road tri­als (n = 22) base­line visu­ospa­tial skills and motion sick­ness were first mea­sured. After a 14-day train­ing peri­od where par­tic­i­pates com­plet­ed 15-min of pen and paper tasks per day, it was found that visu­ospa­tial skills improved by 40%. This increase in visu­ospa­tial abil­i­ty was shown to be direct­ly respon­si­ble for a reduc­tion in motion sick­ness by 51% in the sim­u­la­tor (with a 60% reduc­tion in par­tic­i­pant dropouts) and a 58% reduc­tion in the on-road tri­al. This research has suc­cess­ful­ly iden­ti­fied a new method to reduce motion sick­ness sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty and the impact of these find­ings have wide reach­ing impli­ca­tions for motion sick­ness research, espe­cial­ly in the field of self-dri­ving vehicles.

The Study in Context: