Study On Pathogenesis Of Motion Sickness And Its Diagnostic Methods

Motion sickness is a series of physiological responses including nausea, vomiting, sweating, pallor and other symptoms due to the comfortlessness caused by the excessive stimulation in the movement. Depending on the cause, it can also be referred to as seasickness, car sickness, simulation sickness or airsickness. Motion sickness may bring great inconvenience to people’s lives, especially for the aviation, navigation and aerospace workers whose operating efficiency are dramatically limited by such sickness. However, the clinical studies of this sickness meets difficulties because of its pathogenesis is not clear. The current researches have shown the close relation between motion sickness and vestibular system. However, since the vestibular system is located in the inner ear and has complex and delicate structure, the clinical test for it is difficult and very expensive. Therefore we employ the coupling relationship between eye movements and vestibular system for our purpose. This paper has completed the eye-tracking system which can accurately track eye movement videos, plot eye movement curve and extract nystagmus characteristic parameters. Finally, the proposed eye-tracking system is used to research the motion sickness pathogenesis and diagnostic criteria.The main contents of this paper:(1) Design and complete eye-tracking system. Design and set-up the hardware part of eye-tracking system in order to recording infrared eye-video under infrared light. Complete the software part of eye-tracking system based on VC6.0 which can track eye movement video accurately and extract nystagmus characteristic parameters. Experimental results show that this system with simple equipments and reasonable price can meet the needs of clinical research.(2) Research on the pathogenesis of motion sickness. Firstly, we design the swivel chair experiment to stimulating the vestibular system to induce nystagmus. Then, we use the proposed eye-tracking system to record eye movement videos and extract nystagmus characteristic parameters. Finally, we obtain the slow phase-angular velocity under the different angular acceleration. Experimental results show that the trend of the slow phase-angular velocity stimulated by the different acceleration has obvious differences between the voluntary testee of motion sickness and no motion sickness.(3) Determine the diagnosis standards of motion sickness. Establishing the model of vestibular system with the nystagmus parameters of swivel chair experiments, fitting the data of the model and analyze model parameters of experimenters with different types to obtain diagnostic criteria for motion sickness. Experimental results show that the model parameters of experimenters with different types have obvious differences, in particular for sickness and no motion sickness, and it can be used as a qualitative diagnose standard for motion sickness.