Identification of Motion Sick Individuals

Abstract

The identification of “motion sick” individuals is a challenge because of “misreported” motion sickness, i.e. symptoms developed from reasons unrelated to the nauseogenic stimulus. A behavioral method is proposed to address the confounding effect of the non-specificity associated with motion sickness and sopite syndrome symptoms. The proposed method is based on a within-subject approach with three classification groups; symptoms occurring in static conditions are used as normative to classify whether an individual is motion sick in motion conditions. Participants without any symptoms in both static and motion conditions are classified as “Asymptomatic.” If symptom severity in motion conditions is greater than the static, the participant is identified as motion sick (Symptomatic). If symptom severity in motion is less than or equal to the static condition, it is considered that the individual is reporting symptoms not attributable to motion sickness and is excluded from analysis. As part of a broader study, the proposed method was applied in a laboratory experiment and the corresponding results are compared against two alternative methods. The utility and problems of the proposed method are discussed.