Experimental Investigation of the Efficacy of Preemptive Tilting Seats in mitigating Carsickness

Carsickness (CS) experienced by vehicle passengers is a critical unsolved challenge that impacts existing human-driven vehicles and may limit the adoption of future autonomous vehicles. If CS is reduced, then passengers can perform productive tasks during their commutes. Prior research has demonstrated that a preemptively triggered tilting seat system (TSS), i.e., a seat that tilts the passenger in the direction of the vehicle's turn, can reduce CS response. However, no previous investigations have studied the impact of TSS on passengers performing representative productive tasks when riding a real vehicle under realistic driving conditions. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a human subject study to quantify passenger CS response and assess their task performance in the presence of a preemptively triggered TSS. Twenty-nine healthy adults with varying levels of self-reported motion sickness susceptibility participated in the study across two test conditions. This is the first in-vehicle study that assessed both CS response and passenger task performance for a diverse sample of passengers under realistic driving conditions emulated on a closed test track. The results from this study demonstrated that a preemptively triggered TSS reduces CS scores for male passengers and has no negative influence on their productive task performance. The results also demonstrated that a preemptively triggered TSS did not have an effect on CS scores for female passengers but had a small positive influence on their productive task performance. In addition, the majority of the study participants (∼70%) indicated via a qualitative questionnaire that they would want a preemptively triggered TSS in their car.