Exploring the Participant-Related Determinants of Simulator Sickness in a Physical Motion Car Rollover Simulation as Measured by the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire.

Piotr Rzeźniczek,Marcin Cybulski,Ida Laudańska-Krzemińska,Ewelina Chawłowska,Bartosz Bilski,Agnieszka Lipiak

doi:10.3390/ijerph17197044

Abstract

Physical motion driving simulators serve as a valuable research and training tool. Since many simulator participants suffer from simulator sickness (SS), we aimed to gain a better understanding of participant-related variables that may influence its incidence and severity. The study involved a 2-min mobile-platform car rollover simulation conducted in a group of 100 healthy adult participants. SS was measured with the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire immediately before and after the simulation. We investigated how the symptomatology of SS varies with gender, as well as with participants’ previous experiences such as extra driving training or car accidents. Although many SS symptoms occurred already before the simulation, all the symptoms except burping had a significantly greater incidence and severity after the simulation. Before the simulation, men reported disorientation symptoms more often than women, while participants with prior experiences of extra driving training or car accidents scored significantly higher in three out of four Questionnaire components: nausea symptoms, oculomotor symptoms, and the total score. The study offers interesting insights into associations between SS and prior experiences observed by means of high-fidelity real-motion simulations. More research is needed to determine the nature of these associations and their potential usefulness, for example, in helping accident survivors to cope with the distressing or even potentially disabling psychological consequences of accidents.

Highlights

Simulators of physical motion, i.e., devices or systems that imitate certain phenomena or operations of an object using its approximate model, help to observe simulation participants’ behaviours and assess their physical and psychological state
The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of the latter category, i.e., the participant-related variables that may influence the symptomatology of SS in a real-motion car rollover simulation as measured with the Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ), with a focus on participants’ gender and prior experiences
The effectiveness of in vivo exposure therapy seems similar to the effectiveness of virtual reality exposure treatment (VRET) [83,84]

Summary

Introduction

Simulators of physical motion, i.e., devices or systems that imitate certain phenomena or operations of an object using its approximate model, help to observe simulation participants’ behaviours and assess their physical and psychological state. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of the latter category, i.e., the participant-related variables that may influence the symptomatology of SS in a real-motion car rollover simulation as measured with the SSQ, with a focus on participants’ gender and prior experiences. Current research on driving-related SS/MS/CS tends to use fixed-base simulations [24,32,34,46,47], which offer fewer motion cues than real-motion ones. Advanced real-motion simulators may offer better psychological fidelity by triggering the same psychological processes that underlie a simulated activity [55] This quality would make high-fidelity real-motion simulators useful for exploring if and how SS is influenced by participant-related psychological characteristics and such prior participant experiences that entail big psychological load, for instance car accidents, collisions, and special driving training. We chose to study the effect of gender in order to check how a rollover simulation compares to the results of studies that used different simulation scenarios

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion