Nauseous Driving

"The autonomous-vehicle community understands this is a real problem it  has to deal with."
"One of the great promises of autonomous vehicles, to give time by freeing us from driving, is at risk if we can’t solve the motion sickness problem. If it’s not mitigated in some way, motion sickness may affect people’s willingness to adopt driverless cars,"
"Very few studies have been conducted in cars; instead, a lot of the work has been done for sea and air transportation modes, performed in driving simulators or on motion platforms. These results don’t translate very well to road vehicles."
"A lot of scales that exist in the literature are based on nausea. We need to target comfort levels. Can a passenger use a handheld device while riding? Can passengers be productive with their time?"
"We have found that passenger responses are complicated and have many dimensions. Applications of this testbed will result in the data we need to identify preventative measures and alleviate motion sickness in autonomous vehicles."  
Monica Jones, transportation researcher, University of Michigan

"We are developing algorithms that self-learn based on bodily reactions."
Florian Dauth, engineer, ZF Group, Germany

Driving over bumpy roads can cause motion sickness, so engineers at ZF have developed SMotion, a chassis system that makes riders feel like the vehicle is on a magic carpet.

"You also have to anticipate the high probability that they [autonomous-vehicle passengers] will be using some sort of virtual reality or augmented-reality system."
"You can coordinate the optic flow of visual information inside the V.R. headset such that it's correlated with the actual motion of the vehicle."
"We might have a very low-profile, lightweight type of V.R. platform that's like putting on a pair of sunglasses."
Brian Lathrop, technologist, Volkswagen

It will be considered by many to be a true boon to travel when fully autonomous vehicles take over the controls of motorcars and trucks, leaving the vigilance, the tedium and the skills required to drive a vehicle to artificial intelligence, allowing the passenger/s to just sit back and await safe delivery to their destination. On their way to which they can do whatever they feel like, leaving the arrival strategy to the auspices of trust and experience with a moving object in which they complacently sit and pay attention to the far more important piece of communications technology, their iphone, until arrival.

Um, yes, of course. Motion sickness. Drat. That is a problem requiring attention. And it's what Monica Jones, as a transportation researcher, put her mind to, leading studies into that irritating piece of reality. Studies which she led, beginning in 2017, saw over 150 people strapped into the front seat of a 2007 Honda Accord, wired with sensors and waved off on a drive including about 50 left-hand turns and associated driving manoeuvres.

Each of the participants was driven the same route for a second time,  and assigned the completion of a set of thirteen simple cognitive and visual tasks with the use of an iPad Mini. The test subjects reacted variously; with about 11 percent asking that the car be stopped in reaction to their nausea or for similar unsettling reasons. Four percent of the participants vomited, a fairly convincing reaction to the motion sickness the experience imposed upon them.

An equal number of men and women were tested of the subjects recruited with a spectrum of susceptibility. Ongoing tests will see riders relocated to the back seat of the autonomously-driven vehicle, to gauge reaction. Subjects narrated levels of nausea during the route, for the study and video cameras -- and wired sensors captured heart rate, facial expression, skin temperature and alterations in body and head posture.

All of these reactions were indexed against metrics relating to the vehicle's movement for clues to how riders who become carsick hold their heads, maintain their posture, or position their mobile devices. For obvious reasons, mobile devices and their continual use with driving are given a prominent role in the study. Brian Lathrop with Volkswagen, as a specialist in cognitive psychology, is resigned to the fact that passengers in such vehicles will never chose to set aside their phones.

He anticipates the time when passengers will zoom about highways in self-driving vehicles gearing themselves with fully immersive virtual-reality headgear. His focus is on eliminating motion sickness when V.R. is being worn in a moving automobile, noting discomfort occurs in respect to the disconnect between signals sent to the brain from the inner ear, and what is actually being seen. And in an effort to solve motion sickness development of original V.R content for the car is in the works.

Automotive supplier ZF Group has focused on devising solutions. Florian Dauth with ZF has worked for two years on a project to reduce motion sickness in autonomous vehicles. Automated vehicles already combine data from radar, laser, video and  ultrasonic sensors to navigate safe movement on the road through a machine-generated code determining the path of the vehicle. Now, an algorithm is being devised to include data recognizing the passenger's well-being.

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