Inventor May Have Cured Motion Sickness Without Drugs | Hacker News Reader

Inventor May Have Cured Motion Sickness Without Drugs

defenseone.com

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Another article hiding the main information in a wall of text.

Here is the relevant information for those interested:

""Enter a young inventor named Samuel Owen, who has developed a prototype device called the OtoTech, from Otolith Labs. Worn on a headband behind the ear, it uses subtle vibrations to change the way the brain computes the fact that the body that it’s attached to is in motion. Early tests show it relieves motion sickness without the side effects of drugs, Owen said, though he admits the science is so young that it’s not clear just how.

The vibrations emanating from the OtoTech gently target two of the four fibers that carry data about body motion to the brain via a system of inner ear sensors called the vestibulocochlear nerve. “Two [of the four vestibulocochlear nerve fibers] go to the brain, two go to your reflexes,” Owen said. The trick is to affect the former and not the latter.

“The working hypothesis is that [the vibration] causes a chaotic and noninformative stimulus to go to the brain. Somewhere, probably the cerebellum, there’s a filtering mechanism that filters out noninformative sensed information. It’s the reason you don’t notice the shirt on your back right now,” he said.

In other words, while you remain consciously aware that you’re moving, the balance portion of your brain stops noticing the fact; the data has been drowned out in white noise from the device.""

I found that for myself and for a bunch of friends that chewing gum accomplished this.

Discovered this on a fairly bumpy flight, (gum is lousy for ear pressure imbalances but I carry it anyway). After that I began experimenting on others and it usually worked for them too.

I'll have to try that. My one weird trick here is a little different.

Long ago I read somebody's theory (Bruce Chawin's, maybe?) that the reason so many poisons cause dizziness is that the inner ear is an extremely delicate mechanism and so is easily thrown off such that visual perception and positional sense no longer matches what the ear is saying. The theory further suggests that the brain is evolved to work that backwards: if the body is sufficiently dizzy, it has been poisoned, so it had better empty the stomach.

For me the trick is to keep motion perception in sync with the inner ear. So if I'm on a boat, I'll aim my head in the direction we're heading and think of myself as moving with the boat. Same thing with cars: on a bumpy or swervy taxi ride I'll look straight ahead and think of myself as moving with the car.

It sounds ridiculous, but it works well for me. Living in SF, I've had many chances to try it out.

This was the home remedy for carsickness my parents used with me when I was a kid. "Look at the horizon" is how they put it. Within a couple of seconds I'd internalize the movement of the car and my gut would stabilize.

I was a miserable vomitous mass as a child and I still can't read in the car. The horizon tends to stop progression of symptoms but is pretty slow as a recovery method. It's pretty cold comfort for someone who feels like their guts are trying to escape.

At some point in late grade school I figured out it was a better use of my time to start "working the problem" rather than hold out for some folk wisdom to save me, from car sickness to sore throats (keep your neck warm to prevent laryngitis) and everything in between.

Hanging a hand out the window works much, much faster. Barring that, anything cold on the wrist will help, but it's hard to find the right spot while distressed. Air, window pane in the winter, ice, icepack (best runner up), or a can of soda.

I don't get motion sick, and now I realize the concept of being on a boat and feeling as if the ocean is moving back and forth is completely alien to me. When I'm on a boat, the horizon appears perfectly still to me. If the boat tips, the boat looks like it's tipping to me. Likewise, if I stand on my head, the world looks right side up, but I feel as if I'm upside down. In movies sometimes they'll place a camera upside down to indicate a character is doing sit-ups on a hanging bar or something and I always thought that was a silly way to portray that since the world doesn't look upside down when you are.

Similar theories for why memory and smell are so tied, and why certain smells make you throw up.

I heard they experimented with lacing sheep carcasses with ipecac syrup in Africa to keep the lions away, and it worked. You remember - viscerally - what made you sick and you avoid eating it again.

Sounds like taste aversion.

That's how I was taught to counter motion sickness in the 80s, when we were nomadic (of sorts) and did lots of cross-country drives. We didn't necessarily have to look straight ahead, but look out the window to see the motion while consciously thinking about the fact that we are actually moving. Eg, we were told to "think about the engine pushing the wheels, and the wheels pushing the road, and that's why we're moving".

30+ years later I still use that trick on the very rare occasion when I get motion sickness, and it still seems to work fine.

Among the best solutions for seasickness are to watch the horizon, steer the boat, remove as much clothing as comfort allows, make sure there’s fatty food in your stomach, and stand so that your body is oriented in the direction of the boat’s motion.

I know those work anecdotally (for me and others with whom I’ve been on boats). They were explained to me by an ENT dr during a sailboat race to Bermuda about 20 years ago. His explanation was that it was about aligning the different signals the brain gets during motion.

The headband sounds interesting. There’s few things I’ve experienced that are more miserable than extended motion sickness.

Chewing gum also helps to minimize crying while cutting onions.

This is bad science. This is not a real thing. Neither does running water nearby, or lighting a candle in the kitchen. None of this affects the root cause of your problem.

Onion tears are caused by 2 different chemicals held apart by the onion's cellular structure. Every time you cut an onion, the cells rupture and mix, aerosolization and making you cry when the acid gets into your eyes. A sharp knife (as mentioning in another comment) would help minimize the amount of cellular damage and therefor the gas produced. You can also wear goggles.

Everything else is bunk. From-A former professional chef and person particularly sensitive to onions. (I just learned to cut onions with my eyes closed)

not EVERYTHING else is bunk. Running water nearby might not help but cutting your onions submerged in water would definitely help. Another one is just simple good ventilation. Set up a fan near you and the chemicals will be blown away instead of gradually increasing in concentration around your eyes.

> You can also wear goggles.

Or even just contact lenses. At least for me it eliminates onion tears completely. I had been using them for at least a decade before I started to cook my own proper food, I'll never forget that one time I tried cutting up onions wearing my glasses instead...

I only wear one contact lens, and when I cut onions, the eye with the contact lens is irritated less than the eye without the contact lens.

Some people yes, others no? Contacts would seemingly help, but you're still going to have a build up of acid in your eyes that could eventually become irritating with enough volume.

I've known people who just have seemingly no reaction to onions whatsoever, and others who break into tears the second the first cut happens.

Yeah ymmv, but to me it's night and day - with lenses I'm in your first group, without them I'm in the other. Of course I've never cut more than maybe 20-30 onions at a time, but I never felt much of anything doing that. A single cut without lenses on had my tears flowing instantly. I finally got what all the fuss was about - turns out it's not fussing at all. :)

> Everything else is bunk

Going fast works.

If you're not a professional, using an onion comb (which costs less than $2 and lasts a lifetime) will change your onion-cutting experience. It lets you go way faster and therefore reduce the time you're exposed to tear-inducing chemicals (assuming you're cutting 1-2 onions and not cooking for a whole army).

It's likely that at least half of the effect of a sharp knife is due to time improvements too.

Did you ever try just breathing through your mouth instead of your nose while cutting? This minimizes the exposure via sinuses and works pretty well for me.

It also changes airflow, so the droplets are not pulled directly up towards your eyes, like breathing through your nose does. I might look like a dopey mouth breather, but no tears as long as I concentrate on my breathing.

Open the freezer door and stick your head in with your eyes open. Immediate relief.

Refrigerate your onions before cutting them.

Don’t know why everything else would automatically be bunk.

Sorry, that's a bit hyperbolic on my part. There's so many old wive's tales out there about how to deal with onions. People try to solve it as though the tears were magical and not caused by (relatively) simple chemical reactions.

If you refrigerate your onions, you might be fine for some amount of time and you'll be lessening damage and it's going to help but not solve it at volume (cut one onion, you're fine. Cut 100, not so much).

You could take them out of the fridge in batches....

So does sharpening your knife.

It's funny, I don't remember hearing this before, but once you point it out it seems mind-bogglingly obvious.

There's a kitchen skills book whose title is a nod to sharp knife = less crying relationship but I'm stumped trying to remember what it's called.

This is the top Google result for "sharp knife = less crying":

https://www.amazon.com/Sharper-Your-Knife-Less-You/dp/014311...

Pretty sure this doesn’t work when you are cutting 5kg of onions

As one usually does when preparing a meal.

I had to do this once. And think of all the apprentice chefs doing this.

They must have a better way. And their way will work for 1 onion or 50!

So does washing the peeled onion before cutting it.

I used to wear a co-worker's motorcycle helmet when goggles weren't available.

> It’s the reason you don’t notice the shirt on your back right now...

It never ceases to amuse and sometimes amaze me how statements like this immediately arrest my attention to the thing I’ve not noticed at all. Now I’m only thinking about the shirt on my back, trying to notice it, and thinking of how I haven’t felt it since I first pulled it on this morning.

Same thing but the other way. Sometimes my shirts touching my belly cause me discomfort for some reason. Now I can blame my perhaps faulty cerebellum for not filtering it out.

If you liked the T-shirt trick, follow my instructions: Take a deep breath in. Breath out. You are breathing manually now. Don’t forget that at all times you are only two minutes away from asphyxiation.

Followup comments from the inventor are here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/9ywify/inventor_may...

(found via the Oculus Go article comments from earlier today, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18696840 )

I wonder if this can explain the trick I learned on reddit on how to relieve the ringing-tone (tinnitus) by snapping your fingers on to your skull: https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light...

In other words, can percussion on the back of your head somehow reset/affect the nerves deep inside your head that send signals from your ear to your brain? For tinnitus, it's the audio signal. For motion-sickness, it's the balance signal.

I always assumed that the loud noise reduces sensitivity, tuning out some quiet signals like tinnitus. Same thing as not being able to hear well after a loud concert.

It's always struck me as curious that some game engines cause greater motion sickness that others, despite being similar. For instance I can play UT 2004 and HL1 based engines all day, but put me in front of a Source engine game and I want to barf after 15 minutes. Doom 1 engine makes me nauseous, but Build engine not so. Obviously it's the way my particular brain is picking up on the subtles cues from the engine, so I'd love to be able to strap something on my head and be able to enjoy more titles.

If I feel nauseated during a game, I look for some way to increase the field of view. That always does the trick for me.

Several years ago, I ran into the exact same nausea with the Source engine as the GP, but when I increased the FOV the problem went away.

I've run into nausea with other games that have a narrow FOV. Increasing the FOV (when possible) usually fixes the problem.

As far as I understand, the late Total Biscuit was similar. He frequently advocated for FOV sliders in games. I greatly appreciate his help making FOV sliders more popular.

Teared up a bit reading that last paragraph; I'll never forget his dogged insistence on checking for FOV sliders in options menus.

I've attempted this with Skyrim. Still no dice.

If I remember correctly, the Source engine increased the field of view from 75 degrees to 90. So you could definitely get sick on Half-Life 2 when Half-Life 1 is just fine for you. You might try lowering the field of view in Source games.

I too have wondered this! In fact, Doom 1 was the only game to ever make me throw up (9 or 10 years old at the time). Despite playing all kinds of games comfortably, Half-Life 2 makes me nauseated.

For some reason I've associated the sounds of those games to the sick feeling. I've always wondered if the sound has anything to do with it OR if my brain is just reminded by the sounds and is trying to warn me "I've been sick here".

I would assume your latter conclusion is probably right, but the former would be more interesting!

Yep!

I can play endless hours of Halo, WOW (In FPV), GoldenEye Can't play Red Faction, Portal, Portal 2, that climbing game on Oculus rift...the list goes on.

I've always thought that "bad" physics engines were easier to deal with than ones that were really close. I think with the good ones I've played on, its kind of a visual perception version of the uncanny valley.

Sounds like you might have issues with large field-of-view. Halo was designed to be played from a couch looking a TV somewhat far away, so it has a fairly narrow FOV. I know that at least some of the games you listed (Portal, Portal 2) have configurable FOV. Portal in particular also introduces a particular kind of motion blur to deal with the high-speed movement and rotation in that game, and you could have issues with that.

What is the difference? Head-bobbing patterns make some people sick and those can vary quite subtly, as can fov and perhaps rendering distance (portal has no horizon) and how much you look up/down.

Same here. Played through Half Life 1 with no mishaps at all, but an hour or so of Half Life 2 used to make me very sick.

As did others here, I found that the solution was to disable bobbing. Worked like a charm IIRC.

I’m very resilient to motion sickness but playing Black Mesa made me very sick. I think the real problem is the head bobbing, which is more subtle in some games than others.

That is fascinating. Have you eliminated framerate and field of view as possible causes?

Have you tried comparing Counter Strike and Counter Strike: Source?

Exactly opposite in my case: if I try to play HL1, I’ll probably throw up in 5-10 minutes, but playing games on source engine causes no issues.

What was your UT2k4 username?

This is an interesting take on the technology of vestibular stimulation.

Something to keep in mind is that this technology has been around for a while in the medical field for treatment of balance disorders.

Also - I recall back in the very early 2000s there was a company that came out with a vestibular stimulation system for VR use - the idea was to induce the feeling of motion. You could plug it into your computer, and it had a Windows API that you could control it with.

They were still in a development phase; you could purchase a device and the API for developing with - it wasn't a retail product at the time. Ultimately, the dot-com crash took them out and they disappeared before they really got off the ground (also, VR was in it's "winter" - that didn't help).

I attended SIGGRAPH 2005, and there was a group in the booths that had some headset you would put on that would alter your balance to make you walk in different directions. They had a video playing if someone walking with this device and blind folds on, and someone with a joystick could turn them left and right.

Looked it up and it appears to be a similar type of technology: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1187315

That's super interesting to me. Do you have any idea of what principles were applied or if they have any patents related to that technology?

A few grams of whole ginger root is great for motion sickness, and the side effects are little more than a mild burning sensation in the gut.

It completely kills any horrible car sickness I get from any small motions.

This works for me as well, to a level that's just shy of magic.

I assumed it was just a folk remedy that had little scientific backing, but decided to give it a shot when the Mythbusters ran a double-blind experiment that showed it to be extremely effective. I gave it a try, and at this point wouldn't bother with anything else.

Mythbusters found ginger is more effective than any other OTC motion sickness cure.

It is a remarkably powerful antihistamine - of drug-like strength.

Interesting, I wonder if it would also work for itchiness.

When I went to Antarctica and we crossed the Drake, we were feed ginger candies nonstop. It seemed to work because I never got sick.

not sure why this is getting voted down. Personally candied ginger works for me, although I can't stop eating them...

This study seems to back that up, at least for reducing vomiting and cold-sweating, not so much for vertigo and nausea: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3277342

“The availability of immersive learning environments like virtual-augmented-mixed reality afforded by commercial off-the-shelf technology fosters has the potential to create the paradigm shift necessary to deliver the most ready force ever known,” said Lt. Col. Matthew Strohmeyer.

Ya know what else will create the paradigm shift to deliver the most ready force ever known? Fire this asshat and promote someone who can speak meaningful sentences. After a decade in the Marine Corps, I continue to be amazed by the non-speak these officers use to cover their incompetence.

It's somewhat overwrought, but there actually is some signal in that noise:

- Using off-the-shelf products, instead of bespoke projects. That was historically somewhat rare in the military, I believe?

- "virtual-augmented-mixed reality" seems to be intended to make people think about more than just "virtual" reality, which is a somewhat tired concept

- "most ready force" is a reflection of the military's priorities (not winning world wars, but being flexible)

- "paradigm shift" Ok, I don't have much of an excuse for that one

Overall, I think there's a lot to unpack in that sentence. And I would struggle to repackage it in anything less than a paragraph, or a list as above.

He talks like how 'enterprise' (read: extremely over-designed) software reads, lol.

A little of an aside: I've often wondered if motion sickness is less prevalent in populations that got to their current locations largely by long ship rides (i.e. most Americans). These days sea sickness is a mild inconvenience, but I would imagine that in the 1700s, constantly vomiting for several weeks would reduce one's chances of passing on their genes.

Sounds legit, few million years of going on a long ship ride as a rite of passage (get it?) would do that.

Well, I never thought I would change my position on VR but here we are. If this works it will make VR viable.

It’s so disappointing to remember the hype in 2012 and then look at VR in 2018 only to see an anemic library of titles, little adoption, and not much improvement of the actual headsets. It’s pathetic.

I’ve heard of some headsets in the pipes that are supposed to actually be good. Extremely high resolution and full field of view coverage are absolutely required. There is no technological limit that is stopping a headset like that from existing, and yet it doesn’t. Pimax maybe. Am I missing one?

If you control motion sickness and have a headset like I described above, then you have a minimum viable system. Going beyond that, we need non-discreet light fields and perfect body motion capturing.

VR ‘cured’ my motion sickness. I worked on a VR project in 2017. Before that I'd get carsick unless I was driving. At the start any artificial motion in VR made me queasy, but I got used to it. Now I'm fine.

> Extremely high resolution and full field of view coverage are absolutely required. There is no technological limit that is stopping a headset like that from existing, and yet it doesn’t.

GPUs are the technological limit.

The Vive and Rift push 2160 x 1200 pixels at 90Hz. 90Hz is the bare minimum speed for VR. Nvidia's new RTX 2080 Ti (retail $1,200) cannot maintain 90Hz at 3840x2160 in most games. Two in SLI probably could, but that is much more expensive than the original Vive/Rift CV1 GPU requirements were. We are several generations of GPUs away from being able to double the VR resolution while maintaining 90Hz for less than $600 worth of hardware.

We're getting very close to high quality and inexpensive eye-tracking technology that will make it cheap and easy to implement foveated rendering in VR headsets (basically, only rendering high quality where your eye is looking in a completely unnoticeable manner). That will really drop the hardware requirements and make high field of view/high resolution headsets totally doable.

It's an exciting time for VR.

You are, of course, expecting a certain level of detail in games to have this kind of limitation. I would expect a game like Rez (PS2) to be easily runnable in super high resolutions. Obviously games like RE7 and Fallout 4 wouldn't run without significant changes and engine optimisations, but I could live with simpler looking games.

Just because a headset has high resolution and therefore complete fov coverage and no screen door, does not mean that it has to be utilized. If someone has a weak computer they can render a lower resolution and smaller area and scale it. Every headset should be capable of high resolution because anything less than that is not compelling vr. Multiple gpus is fine.

I agree that in general it is a very important improvement for VR to allow motion-sensitive people to enjoy it. However I do not agree this by itself will make VR much more viable than it is now. Motion sickness is just one problem, but without addressing others (high price, low resolution, narrow FOV, bulky headset), it will not get much more viable.

And I say it as someone who considers current state of VR to be amazing and enjoys it daily. But personally for me relatively low resolution would be #1 priority to improve.

I've read a research study showing that better resolution doesn't actually help.

No, not for nausea. I’m talking about just having a good vr experience.

I must try this. I've always had serious 3D motion sickness, I was just looking at a friend playing Monster Hunter World for like 30 minutes and got sick. And then I just couldn't look at the game screen anymore, it would inflict sickness instantly. This is not even VR.

I've been wondering for a while if you could overwrite the signal on the vestibular nerve. This just drowns it in noise, but presumably it should be possible to electrically excite the same fibers with a signal that matches what you are seeing. I have heard that they do something similar already in medicine for helping people with balance problems caused by the inner ear, though I gather it has to be tweaked patient by patient.

Another recent invention to help with motion sickness.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-these-glasse...

The glasses are quite expensive (for something you would never wear outside of the car).

And despite the claim, they are not a new invention - Anti-sea sickness googles and glasses have been around for almost a decade

http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2017/04/anti-sea-sickness-glasses...

There are also these: https://www.autoblog.com/2018/07/13/citroen-seetroen-glasses...

You could make those pretty easily. I wonder if the peripheral ones are really necessary?

When the glasses were posted earlier, I made a comment about making them out of simple novelty straw glasses (like so https://goo.gl/UKrkbt). Add some coloured water, cut and seal the ends and voila.

Great idea! I’ll give it a try.

I really would like to know what these would feel like while one is in a sensory deprivation tank.

Or - what impact they have on deaf people (Specifically the idea of the vibrations hitting parts of the inner ear - if external vibratory stimulations have any impact in both of the above scenarios)

There is a whole pile of research out there into deaf people and motion sickness. The most interesting being that hearing loss due to certain kinds of nerve damage can result in basically becoming immune to motion sickness. I’m struggling to find the exact citation I want to share (I read it several years ago now) at the moment, but I read about it while I was researching into the early days of space flight, if I recall it came off of the early research as a result of following up what was the cause of one test subject being utterly immune to any attempt to make him motion sick. The end result being not very useful for the practical aspects of spaceflight, but ending up with the discovery that a group of people with a specific type of auditory nerve damage are basically 100% immune to motion sickness is certainly an interesting result in terms of understanding the cause of motion sickness.

Interesting. I am deaf, thanks to tumors on the auditory/vestibular nerves and do experience pretty bad loss of balance issues, to the point where people often think I am walking around drunk when I am not :) But I can't remember ever experiencing motion sickness! Time to apply to NASA I guess.

Noticed in the materials for the product: "Nearly Silent (<50dB)". Seems like bogus copy - for every broadband acoustic measure of dB I'm aware of 50 dB would be very non-silent.

...And That Could Mean a Lot to the US Military, well yes because US Military travels around a globe very often. :\

I thought the Sea-Band Wristband[0] type of products already went there, even for morning sickness relief?

[0] https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/sea-band-wristband/ID=prod...

I’ve tried these on my kids and first thought it worked, but next time we went for a long drive it didn’t work at all. Difficult to really test these things on kids as sometimes we can drive for hours with no issues, while other times they puke after 20 minutes ...

Why would those work?

My son said, "how do these work, is it just the placebo effect?". I replied that why would it matter if it was a placebo, as long as it worked?

But they did work, and he seemed happy enough conning himself.

I'm not your son. That you've found an explanation to convince a child to stop asking questions isn't exactly relevant to me.

The scientifically documented efficacy of the placebo effect is, however.

Exactly, and my son was smart enough to recognise that it may just be a placebo, but with an amazing easy-going attitude was happy to see if this placebo worked on him.

And next time your son has a headache, you'll give him the sea-band. The placebo effect is a miracle cure that treats all kinds of things, right?

Yes, indeed I note that often in drug trials they hand out the placebo with the instructions "this is the drug to treat a different condition to the one you have"

Placebo has never worked for me. So as someone who gets sea-sick, it's pretty damn important to me that a product which intends to operate based on the placebo effect be identified as such.

Not everybody is healed by lies, after all.

How can we tell if we've been helped by a placebo?

You just say "I feel better" if any scientists or doctors ask you if anything changed. You'll be a placebo-effect supporting data point in no time.

I meant, how can we say 'they don't help me'? We may already be taking them.

If you're taking them and the symptoms don't go away, then obviously they don't work. I don't understand why that's a question?

...because we may be prescribed what's essentially a placebo and it seems to work and we don't know that it was a placebo. The claim that 'placebos don't work on me' seems like a hard claim to verify.

FFS. If you're prescribed a medicine and it doesn't work, then if it was a placebo, it didn't work. Not hard to verify at all. A drug that doesn't work isn't going to be any less effective than a placebo. Placebos are not 100% effective. We know this because we can identify when they don't work.

If you give me a sea-band and tell me it is "powered by placebo", and it doesn't do shit, then the placebo doesn't work. That's even easier to figure out.

Also taking the line that "Nothing works on me unless I understand the mechanism" is kind of obtuse, considering that the article we are commenting on is about a device that relieves motion sickness, where even the inventor doesn't make any claims to know the mechanism by which they relieve the sickness. This may be the placebo effect, of course.

It is not my understanding of the mechanism that makes a drug work. It is my understanding of the mechanism that I use to justify giving money to a company that offers a product to me.

If a product is being sold to treat motion sickness, it damn well better be able to do that via some actual fucking mechanism. If your standards aren't that high, then perhaps I should get into the snake oil business. Seems I'm surrounded by suckers.

Why would subtle vibrations behind the head work? ;-) I'm sure someone has a theory about each one. I don't particularly claim that it works, but: a) pharmacies carry them, and b) anecdotal evidence suggests that it may work for some people.

See the article for their theory.

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