Evaluation of Visual-Induced Motion Sickness from Head-Mounted Display Using Heartbeat Evoked Potential: A Cognitive Load-Focused Approach

According to the sensory conflict theory, motion sickness is closely tied to the brain's ability to process information and its resources for adjusting to the variety of sensory inputs present in VR content. The goal of this study was to create a mechanism for analyzing motion sickness using the heart-evoked potential (HEP) phenomena and to suggest new metrics for doing so. In this study, participants watched VR content on 2D and head-mounted displays (HMD) for 15 minutes. Using paired t-tests and ANCOVA, the responses of HEP measures such as alpha power, latency, and amplitude of the first and second HEP components were compared. This study established that motion sickness impairs cognitive functioning, as indicated by an increase in HEP's alpha power. Additionally, during the sensation of motion sickness, the suggested indicators, such as latency and amplitude of the HEP waveform, demonstrated substantial variations and displayed strong relationships with alpha power measurements. According to the multitraitmultimethod matrix, latencies of the first HEP component in particular are suggested as superior quantitative evaluators of motion sickness to other measures. The proposed motion sickness model was put into practise using a support vector machine and validated using data from 20 additional subjects. The findings of the motion-sickness categorization included accuracy, F1 score, precision, recall, and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.875, 0.865, 0.941, 0.8, and 0.962, respectively.