Most astronauts suffer from space motion sickness. This causes nausea and vomiting, but also impaired reaction time and decision making, which can jeopardize mission tasks. Current desensitization programs have shown limited efficacy on astronauts. Furthermore, they attenuate the overall vestibular response and may increase reliance on visual cues, associated with stronger space motion sickness. Conversely, a tendency toward an ego-referenced frame (my body z-axis is my vertical reference) has been observed in astronauts with less symptoms.
This project aims to create:
- A novel training paradigm that adapts astronauts to integrate signals in an ego-referenced frame selectively when gravity is absent/unreliable (i.e. in orbit), reducing space motion sickness.
- A wearable-devices system that delivers this paradigm, allowing astronauts to train anywhere. The key innovation is the manipulation of multi-sensory cues using wearable technologies (virtual reality-VR, haptic feedback-HF).
This approach is successfully used in rehabilitation of vestibular patients. We will reverse the patients' rehabilitation, creating a pre-rehabilitation. This will store in the "sensory memory" of astronauts an alternative multi-sensory integration strategy based on an ego-referenced frame, de-adapting astronauts from relying only on gravity.
To develop the idea, we will:
- Complement vestibular conflicts with VR/HF stimuli to create a virtual, multi-sensory motion environment where the gravity cue is (artificially) made unreliable. This will be the Earth-based 'training ground' where astronauts can learn to selectively switch to non-gravity based cues.
- Adjust VR/HF stimuli in the 'training ground' to promote multi-sensory integration in ego-referenced frame, to be stored as a strategy to be used in orbit.
- Adapt the optimal VR/HF stimuli to vestibular conflicts induced by Galvanic Vestibular Stimulations(GVS); this will allow for a novel portable training set for astronauts (VR-HF-GVS)
