Heart Rate Variability Responses to Visually Induced Motion Sickness

Analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) can reveal a range of useful information regarding the dynamics of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It is considered a robust and reliable tool to understand even some subtle changes in ANS activity. Here, we study the “hidden” characteristic changes in HRV during visually induced motion sickness; using nonlinear analytical methods, supplemented by conventional time- and frequency-domain analyses. We computed HRV from electrocardiograms (ECG) of 14 healthy participants measured at baseline and during nausea. Primarily hypothesizing evident differences in measures of physiologic complexity (SampEn; sample entropy, FuzzyEn; fuzzy entropy), chaos (LLE; largest Lyapunov exponent) and Poincare ́/Lorenz (CSI; cardiac sympathetic activity, CVI; cardiac vagal index) between the two states. We found that during nausea, participants showed a markedly higher degree of regularity (SampEn, p = 0.0275; FuzzyEn, p = 0.0006), with a less chaotic ANS response (LLE, p = 0.0004). CSI significantly increased during nausea compared to baseline (p = 0.0005), whereas CVI did not appear to be statistically different between the two states (p = 0.182). Our findings suggest that motion sickness-induced ANS perturbations may be quantifiable via nonlinear HRV indices. These findings have implications for understanding the malaise of motion sickness and in turn, aid development of therapeutic interventions to relieve motion sickness symptoms.