Individual predictors of the susceptibility for motion-related sickness: A systematic review.

Background: Individuals seem to be differently susceptible to motion-related sickness (motion sickness, visually induced sickness etc.). Investigations of the reasons for these different susceptibilities have revealed many potential factors that could predict individual susceptibility to motion-related sickness.

Objective: This paper attempts to conduct a comprehensive literature review on inter-individual predictors of susceptibility to motion-related sickness using systematic approaches.

Methods: After a systematic literature research, titles and abstracts of 1778 publications were screened for relevance. Reference lists of selected publications were searched for additional studies. This procedure yielded 184 relevant publications.

Results: The identified predictors were clustered into demographic, physiological and psychological aspects. Among these predictors, the factors gender, length of velocity storage and anxiety showed the greatest predictive power. In addition, individual susceptibility to motion-related sickness is also to a large extent dependent on the degree of habituation to the aversive stimulus.

Conclusions: Some of the identified influencing factors seem to have different effects on physically and visually induced motion sickness. More research is needed to close gaps, especially on predictive factors of visually induced motion sickness.