What do you have to do in a self-driven car in the future? Just sit back and relax. It will drive itself, find your address as it navigates through traffic, entertain you on your trip, all while avoiding accidents and caring for the environment. However, would all this help if you suffer from motion sickness? Could a car take care of that nauseating feeling that accompanies your every travel?
Jaguar Land Rover has come up with an algorithm that produces a ‘wellness score’ for every passenger, with the help of which, a vehicle’s driving and cabin settings can be automatically personalised to lessen the effects of motion sickness by up to 60%. The research was done by Jaguar Land Rover’s motion sickness research.
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The auto giant has already gathered 15,000 miles of motion sickness data and tested the impact brought on by conducting a task while traveling, such as checking emails. With this data, they have created a baseline driving style for autonomous vehicles to work towards, which decreases the requirement for steering corrections and ultimately the risk of motion sickness, while passengers work or relax.
“This cutting-edge research has created a solution that, with its solid scientific foundation, can make travelling enjoyable, regardless of your susceptibility to motion sickness. As a parent of young children, who are most susceptible to car sickness, I am particularly excited by the benefits this research can have in making long journeys comfortable and stress-free for families,” Dr. R. Steve Iley, the Chief Medical Officer of Jaguar Land Rover said.
Motion sickness is a result of eyes observing pieces of information that are different from how the inner ear, skin, or body forces, sense them, for example reading in a moving vehicle. According to Spencer Salter, wellness technology researcher at Jaguar Land Rover, motion sickness is a condition that is felt by more than 70% of people.
A Tata Group release said, “The ‘wellness score’ calculates how susceptible individual drivers and passengers are to feeling car sick, using biometric sensors that record physiological signals. Combining this with motion and dynamics data, the vehicle will reliably know when a passenger or driver is becoming motion sick – before they do.”
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Jaguar or Land Rover vehicles are already being designed with the aim of helping travellers battle feelings of car sickness. For example, the Jaguar E-PACE, consists of 26 different seat configurations, so that passengers can find a position that raises the infotainment screen in accordance with their eye level and to switch on the cooling seat function. Having optimum eye coordination with the infotainment screen and access to air cooling are proven to reduce the probability of motion sickness by a high margin.
The E-PACE also contains what is called ‘Adaptive Dynamics’, which can alter the ride settings every 10-milliseconds to make sure that passengers always receive high levels of comfort. This in turn helps in removing low frequency motion from the road, a factor that can cause nausea. As the first phase of this research concludes this month, Jaguar Land Rover is poised to implement the findings into their projects to create a highly personalised cabin experience for customers in future vehicles.
