With the commercialization of autonomous driving technology and diversification of how passengers spend their time, carsickness is a growing concern. No effective quantitative method of spotting it using physiological indices in driving conditions of a vehicle has been found up to now, but that appears to be changing.
In a recent International Journal of Automotive Engineering Research Paper, a Nissan team presented a study named: “Development of evaluating methods for passenger’s motion thickness in real driving environment”. It has been presented at the JSAE 2020 Fall Congress.
The objective of this study was to develop a robust method for quantitative evaluation in real driving environment. As a result of inducing motion sickness of a back passenger by driving a vehicle on a test course, changes of forehead humidity, which reflects the amount of sweating, increased significantly. The result indicates forehead humidity is an effective index for quantifying motion sickness in real driving environment.
Many other parameters have been researched lately, including Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Respiration Rate (RR), Electrodermal activity (EDA), blood flow, dermal temperature, but no complete evaluation has been really done in real driving conditions, only in simulator conditions.
Here, it has been done on a test circuit, with a driver and male and female experimenters, following a routine of a 700m lap tour, with acceleration and deceleration from 20 to 50 km/h, questions to the experimenter, a 1-minute rest period, and again and again.
It confirmed that forehead humidity increased a lot with the high intensity conditions, and correlate with subjective level of discomfort declared by the experimenters. EDA was measured, but was not significantly different.
These results should help to mitigate motion sickness, if only by re-designing air flow and temperature to the occupants.
Reference: International Journal of Automotive Engineering Vol.12 N°2 2021; Research Paper 20214436
