Modeling of head movements towards lateral acceleration direction via system identification for motion sickness study

Motion sickness (MS) can easily occur especially during slalom or curve driving. Generally, the passengers are more susceptible to MS compared to the drivers. It is already proven that the difference of their susceptibility is because of their different head tilt movements towards lateral acceleration direction when negotiating a curve. During curvature, the passengers tend to tilt their head towards lateral acceleration direction while the drivers tend to tilt their head against the lateral acceleration direction. Therefore, to reduce MS in slalom or curvy paths, it is necessary for the passenger to follow the driver's head movements. It will be easier to design MS minimization strategies if we know the head movements from both passengers and drivers in mathematical expression. Thus, this study proposed modeling of the passenger's and driver's head movements towards vehicle's lateral acceleration via System Identification method. Experiment is conducted to collect the data for the modeling process. The modeling results show the correlation between passenger's and driver's head movements with lateral acceleration direction in first and second transfer function forms. With further study, the derived model can be contributed in motion sickness minimization study.