Analysis of Driving Simulator Sickness Symptoms: Zero-Inflated Ordered Probit Approach

Driving simulators can provide safe real-world driving conditions that may help researchers study driving behavior; however, driving simulator sickness (DSS) has been recognized as one of the most frequent challenges associated with using driving simulators. The DSS issue may affect the validity and reliability of results obtained during the driving simulator experience. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the potential consequences of DSS in the virtual environment of a driving simulator. The goal of this study is to analyze DSS symptoms among participants of a driving simulator by their demographics. The samples of four simulator studies were combined, including a total of 259 participants who were recruited from different socio-demographic backgrounds and drove a fixed-base driving simulator. All these studies used the same proportion of mixed urban and suburban content in designing the simulation environments of the experiments. A DSS questionnaire based on the standard Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) has been used to measure the severity of DSS symptoms-general discomfort, fatigue, headache, eyestrain, blurred vision, salivation, sweating, dizziness, and nausea-among participants. This study applies zero-inflated ordered probit and ordered probit models to evaluate the possible statistical relationships between demographic characteristics and experiment duration, and DSS symptoms. The results show that there is a positive direct statistical relationship between the duration of the experiment and DSS. Also, older participants have more general discomfort, fatigue, blurred vision, and headache symptoms with DSS than do younger ones. Similarly, female participants experience headache and nausea symptoms more than men do.