Motion sickness and motion characteristics of vessels at sea

Abstract

Measurements of vessel motion and consequent seasickness amongst passengers have been made on six ships, two hovercraft and a hydrofoil. Data are presented for 20 029 passengers surveyed on 114 voyages involving 370 hours of motion recordings. Vomiting incidence and illness rating were found to be linearly related to the root-mean-square magnitude of the vertical z-axis acceleration. Sickness increased with increasing duration of exposure and a measure of motion ‘dose’ is examined as a convenient way of combining the variables of stimulus magnitude and duration. High frequency motion in hovercraft at about 0·6 Hz was found to be less provoking of sickness than similar magnitudes at lower frequencies. Motion in axes other than the vertical correlated less highly with sickness, although there was some intercorrelation between axes. The results presented enable predictions to be made of seasickness occurrence in marine vessels and other forms of transport where low frequency vertical oscillations are encountered.

Keywords:

• Seasickness
• Motion illness
• Vomiting
• Ship motion