Quantitative analysis of time-course development of motion sickness caused by in-vehicle video watching

• We evaluated how severely in-vehicle video watching brings motion sickness.
• Video-watching aggravated motion sickness 2.7 times as much as ordinary car-riding.
• Video-watching aggravated motion sickness 25% less severely than book-reading.
• A statistical protocol was introduced to analyze incomplete within-subject data.
• The new model can handle missing entries and capture the time-course development.

It has been common and popular to watch videos in moving vehicles. An important issue in developing comfortable in-vehicle video watching systems is to understand how passengers get motion sickness. With this in mind, the goals of this paper are (1) to introduce an experimental protocol and a statistical analysis procedure for quantitatively evaluating how motion-sickness is developed during car-driving, and (2) to demonstrate their practical usefulness with a working experimental study. In the experimental protocol, motion sickness was induced to subjects by requiring them to watch an in-vehicle video during 15-min driving, and the time-course development of motion sickness was recorded by asking subjects to evaluate their degree of motion sickness every one minute. A main difficulty in analyzing data from these studies is how to incorporate the individual difference in motion-sickness susceptibility. Since susceptibilities are markedly different among subjects, within-subject design experiments are preferred. However, it is practically difficult to conduct complete set of trials because subjects who are not willing to continue experiment (due to heavy motion sickness) should be able to withdraw from the subsequent series of trials in accordance with ethical requirement. To cope with this incomplete data issue, we introduce a statistical data analysis procedure that enables to estimate and impute missing entries in the within-subject design table. Using a working example, we demonstrated that the protocol and the procedure are useful for quantitative assessment of the time-course motion sickness development. We conducted an in-vehicle motion-sickness study with 31 subjects, where the time-course motion sickness developments of video-watching, book-reading, and normal riding conditions were compared. The results indicate that video-watching brings on 2.7 times more severe motion sickness than normal riding, but 25% less severe than book-reading.