Investigating How Brain Stimulation Mitigates Motion Sickness Using Spatiotemporal Nystagmus Parameters Captured in VR

Mitigating motion sickness with non-invasive cortical vestibular brain stimulation (vBS) is promising because it does not require redesigning VR content or altering the motion profile of a moving platform. Instead, it aims to enhance individuals’ intrinsic resistance to motion sickness. However, the mechanism underlying its online efficacy remains unclear (Here, “online efficacy” means the observed motion sickness reduction during vBS not before or after vBS). Motivated by lower motion sickness susceptibility observed in congenital nystagmus patients, we hypothesized that reductions in motion sickness under vBS condition are associated with increased eye movement instability. Leveraging sham-controlled, sex-balanced eye-tracking data from an open-access database, this study presents the first evaluation of a 20 Hz-vBS approach targeting the vestibular cortices as a countermeasure to motion sickness, using spatiotemporal eye movement metrics derived from eye-tracking data collected in VR. Results show that reduced motion sickness under active vBS indeed increased eye movement instability temporarily and spatially, compared to sham vBS. We also found that the temporal metrics was more strongly associated with female participants, whereas the spatial metric was more strongly associated with male participants.