EEG effects of motion sickness induced in a dynamic virtual reality environment

Abstract

The Electroencephalogram (EEG) dynamics which relate to motion sickness are studied in this paper. Instead of providing visual or motion stimuli to the subjects to induce motion sickness, we employed a dynamic virtual-reality (VR) environment in our research. The environment consisted of a 3D surrounding VR scene and a motion platform providing a realistic situation. This environment provided the advantages of safety, low cost, and the realistic stimuli to induce motion sickness. The Motion Sickness Questionnaire (MSQ) was used to assess the sickness level, and the EEG effects on the subjects with high sickness levels were investigated using the independent component analysis (ICA). The fake-epoch extraction was then applied to the nausea-related independent components. Finally we employed the Event-Related Spectral Perturbation (ERSP) technology on the fake-epochs in order to determine the EEG dynamics during motion sickness. The experimental results show that most subjects experienced an 8-10 Hz power increase to their motion sickness-related phenomena in the parietal and motor areas. Moreover, some subjects experienced an EEG power increase of 18-20 Hz in their synchronized responses recorded in the same areas. The motion sickness-related effects and regions can be successfully obtained from our experimental results.