Can Sea Bands ® Be Used to Mitigate Simulator Sickness?

Abstract

Summary:A North American tier-one automotive supplier (TOAS) conducted a study in 2002 using a vehicle driving simulator to study simulator sickness. The goals of the study were twofold: (a) determine a screening process to identify those individuals who should be excluded from future simulator studies due to their susceptibility to simulator sickness and (b) explore a mitigation technique to lessen the severity of simulator sickness symptoms using the FDA-approved Sea Bands ® acupressure wrist bands. The study revealed that prior experience with motion sickness is not necessarily a good predictor of who will become sick in a simulator, but one's own perception of susceptibility to motion and simulator sicknesses may be a reliable predictor. It also revealed that the acupressure wrist bands may be an effective method for managing simulator sickness among older participants.

Attention Function Structure of Older and Younger Adult Drivers

“…Future work will continue to develop the attention battery to better discriminate attention functions and to continue to increase the external validity of the simulated driving scenario using a more realistic simulator. It is also imperative to external validity to decrease the loss of older participants because of motion discomfort, so the development of counter-measures (e.g., Wesley, Sayer, & Tengler, 2005) will be very important in future studies.…”

Investigation of visually induced motion sickness: a comparison of mitigation techniques in real and virtual environments

“…acupressure, acupoints may be stimulated by application of mild electric current (Sinha et al, 2011). Acupressure wrist bands have been found to be effective in older virtual environment users (Wesley and Tengler, 2005), but not useful for helicopter passengers, especially due to possible neuromuscular fatigue that may have led to an increased delay in response times to the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (Estrada et al, 2007;Drummond et al, 2005). As a result, wrist bands would not be appropriate for normal or consumer use of immersive virtual environments.…”