Increased bone conducted vibration reduces motion sickness in automated vehicles

Abstract

Motion sickness is common within many forms of transport; it affects most of the population who experience some symptoms at some time. Automated vehicles (AV) offer productivity benefits but also increased incidence of motion sickness. There are mitigation methods with varying degrees of effectiveness to combating motion sickness. Bone conductive vibration (BCV) applied to the head is a proven motion sickness mitigation. It is not known if the level of vibration is important. Twenty-nine participants were subjected to normal urban driving whilst undertaking a 'gaze down' non-driving related task (NDRT) within an AV cabin whilst wearing the BCV device. High and low vibration settings were randomly chosen as were the seating positions in a between participants design. Twenty-five participants successfully completed the experiment. It was found that when the device is applied to the head, the time to nausea increased by up to a factor of 1.6 when set to high over low settings for highly susceptible participants. BCV did not improve task performance.