Special report Developments in cures for motion sickness
MARK CHISNELL ON how AUTONOMOUS CARS ARE driving The QUEST FOR A MOTION SICKNESS CURE
Seasickness is something everyone who ventures to sea will have experienced – either the first-hand misery, or the second-hand experience of watching someone else suffer. Finding ways to stave off the onset and alleviate the symptoms is a problem we can all relate to.
In my case, this is personal. I’ve always had a problem with motion sickness – which is a bit of an issue when you’re a professional racing navigator. I’m not alone: Volvo Ocean Race skipper Chris Nicholson recently talked about how he got seasick when he made the shift from Olympic to offshore racing.
For me, it all started young. I suspect I’m not alone in first suffering motion sickness as a child in my parent’s car – but we’ll come back to that.
The coming revolution in autonomous cars has made the problem of motion sickness more urgent for the automotive industry. Many people don’t get carsick simply because they are steering. Once released from that task by a self-driving car, the temptation to pick up a phone and go through a few emails or watch a movie is going to be overwhelming. And the outcome will often be nausea.
Dr Cyriel Diels is the academic director of the National Transport Design Centre at Coventry University, and began writing about the potential issues for automated vehicles about five years ago.
“It’s now becoming quite a big topic, it’s nice to see that it’s being picked up by the industry,” Dr Diels told me. He works with several automotive manufacturers including Jaguar Land Rover, BMW and Ford, “trying to understand how big the problem is and trying to understand how we can mitigate it.”
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) recently announced that it had developed techniques that could reduce the impact of motion sickness by 60%, and it has several patents pending on these technologies. I wanted to see if any of them
might be useful to the sailing fraternity.
Spencer Salter is the principal wellness technology researcher at JLR. Salter was originally a technical specialist in vehicle dynamics, concentrating on the digital modelling of ride comfort.
“Motion sickness is a natural extension to vehicle ride,” explained Salter. “I was asked to investigate and understand motion sickness to ready JLR for an automated future.
“It probably started 550 million years ago with the hagfish,” he explains. Interesting fact: the hagfish was the first organism that developed a balance sensor (vestibular system).
“Any living organism that evolved from the hagfish – including humans – has the potential to suffer motion sickness,” explains Salter. “Fish, birds, mammals all suffer. The theory behind motion sickness is that of a conflict between observed and sensed motion.
Wave motion
Even fish may benefit from avoiding wave motion, particularly at shore, giving them an evolutionary reason to avoid motion sickness.
“I don’t think it is a coincidence that windinduced wave motion centres at 0.17Hz (one wave every 6 seconds), which has also been proven to be the most provocative motion for humans,” says Salter.
“The nausea occurs when the eyes observe motion that is not in keeping with the sense of motion that is measured by the vestibular and or somatosensory system. When there is an error between the observed and expected, motion sickness can occur.”
This was always my experience – things got a lot worse as soon as I went below deck, and any sufferer of seasickness is likely to have experienced an acceleration of symptoms when they can’t see the horizon.
Ride sensors allow car manufacturers
‘ANY FORM OF CUE THAT CAN OFFER SOME INSIGHT INTO THE FUTURE PATH OF A BOAT WILL HELP’
to predict when motion sickness will build, which they can then mitigate by modifying the suspension and other settings to change the vehicle’s motion.
Modifying the suspension is not something we can do in the average 40ft yacht. There are other things we can do to help, though. Additional cues to the motion, and habituation – or simply getting used to the sensation – can be useful in both preventing and limiting the impact of motion sickness symptoms.
Ground reference points
Salter explains; “A fixed ground reference will help. So, a projected line on a gimbal will allow a virtual horizon to be seen below deck.”
Dr Diels says this is being developed in the auto industry. “Artificial horizons are being used in various vehicles already to some extent.”
A French product called Boarding Light (www.boardinglight.com) uses light columns to create visual ‘horizons’ in both cars and large ships, and claim that it has reduced motion sickness for many users.
“There is an anecdotal story that people used to get less sick on boats because there were hanging lamps aboard – these would move and give an indication of the vertical,” added Dr Diels.
“There are also mitigation devices in development that overstimulate or confuse other senses, so motion sickness does not develop,” said Spencer Salter.
Another factor that makes autonomous cars particularly likely to cause motion sickness is the fact that passengers do not anticipate the motion in the same way as a driver or front seat passenger in a conventional car.
“Any form of cue that can offer the passengers some insight into the future path of the boat or vehicle will help,” explains Salter, “So that might be a display of the wheel or tiller, anything that allows anticipation of the motion.
“A simple camera showing the horizon and the next wave to those below deck might be quite useful.”
These would all be realistic options for installation in a smaller yacht, in contrast to the stabilisers relied on by the superyacht industry.
The other thing that really helps is habituation, and this can be trained by getting into a situation where you start to feel sick, and then pull back out of it after just a few minutes.
“It allows the body to become naturally acclimatised, starting with only a few minutes below deck and increasing over time for example,” said Salter. “Keeping the levels of motion sickness below nausea thresholds during habituation is more effective than actually vomiting. If you push yourself to vomit, you may develop aversion and an expectation that you will become sick before you start the next voyage. Better to keep the sickness episodes low.”
Start young
The best way to habituate is to start young. “Children absorb motion and visual data as they develop,” explained Salter. “They top up their neural store with every trip and experience.”
The store of experiences can be gradually widened, and it doesn’t all need to be at sea. “They must get slightly motion sick while building that store of experiences. It is mainly built in the playground on swings and roundabouts as children – remember all the times when you lay on the floor with the world spinning?” It turns out that it all helps to build sailors less prone to motion sickness.
What doesn’t help is one bad experience after another in the back of Dad’s car – and I think that this is where I went wrong. My children seem to suffer less.
“Air conditioning is one area that has improved over time,” explained Salter, as keeping cool fends off the feelings of nausea. Uber is experimenting with systems that will modify the airflow in the cabin when an automated car brakes, providing both a cooling breeze and a cue to allow passengers to anticipate the motion.
Modern child car seats have also helped reduce car sickness, raising children up so they can see out and get good visual data. “In my day there were no such things,” Salter says, recalling “often sitting in the footwell, getting hot from the exhaust from the tunnel.”
If that was also your early experience of motion sickness – and it was certainly mine – then it’s likely that this is what’s remembered. “This could cause aversion and the opposite to habituation; you will get sick as you think you will get sick. [It’s] psychosomatic to a small degree.
“All healthy people can get motion sickness, only the profoundly deaf and others with vestibular dysfunction clinically do not suffer. There are variations in sensitivity, genetics, gender, age, ethnicity and psychological profile but mostly it is due to the neural store.”
So while technology might be able to help alleviate seasickness, in order to overcome it, you also just have to get used to it.