Reducing Motion Sickness in Passengers of Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles by Presenting a Driving Path

Autonomous personal mobility vehicles (APMVs) are small mobility devices designed for individual automated transportation in shared spaces. In such environments, frequent pedestrian avoidance maneuvers may cause rapid steering adjustments and passive postural responses from passengers, thereby increasing the risk of motion sickness. This study investigated the effects of providing path information on 16 passengers' head movement behavior and motion sickness while riding an APMV. Through a controlled experiment comparing manual driving (MD), autonomous driving without path information (AD w/o path), and autonomous driving with path information (AD w/ path), we found that providing path cues significantly reduced MISC scores and delayed the onset of motion sickness symptoms. In addition, participants were more likely to proactively align their head movements with the direction of vehicle rotation in both MD and AD w/ path conditions. Although a small correlation was observed between the delay in yaw rotation of the passenger's head relative to the vehicle and the occurrence of motion sickness, the underlying physiological mechanism remains to be elucidated.