19-02-2025
Machine at UND kills motion sickness -- if you can stomach the spinning
Feb. 19—GRAND FORKS — Jennifer Watne spent a day last week working diligently to persuade her latest patient to break free from the Earth's shackles and climb into the spinning hydraulic box on the ground floor of UND's Odegard Hall.
"The funny thing is, you'll be moving out here, and you're not going to be feeling it," said Watne, an aerospace physiologist. "It's going to be moving a lot faster than you actually feel, because you're sitting at the center of gravity."
The box, a windowless spatial disorientation trainer painted with a mockup of a commercial jet's livery, beckoned to this afternoon's patient, 29-year-old pilot-in-training Jack Graven.
Graven was the latest in a cadre of wannabe pilots who have traveled to Grand Forks in recent months since UND's Department of Aerospace Physiology opened its motion sickness desensitization course to the general public.
UND has been offering its motion sickness treatment to aviation students for the last 18 months. Adopted from Air Force air sickness training from the 1990s, it is likely the only such program available to civilians in the United States.
Graven had driven from outside Minneapolis, where he had enrolled in flight school a little over a year ago. He'd caught the flying bug and signed up for aviation classes after his wife gifted him an introductory flight over Minneapolis.
Unfortunately, the mild nausea he felt on his first flight had come back for each of the subsequent 190 hours he spent in the air. At times, it had gotten so bad that he had to turn his Piper Archer back to the airfield.
Most aviation students experience motion sickness their first several hours in the air, according to Thomas Zeidlik, UND's director of aerospace physiology. A few, though, can't seem to get over it, posing a roadblock to what is for some a lifelong goal.
Graven's flight instructors had told him he had one of the worst cases of motion sickness they'd ever seen — which was a problem, because Graven wants to be a commercial pilot.
Watne kept chatting as as she corralled Graven into the trainer, recounting an anecdote she'd heard in an aviation class about a Canadian jetliner that had run out of fuel at 41,000 feet and glided safely to the ground; the swear word her 8-year-old had picked up in Catholic school; and riding the new Iron Gwazi roller coaster at Busch Gardens outside Tampa, Florida.
The stream of conversation, delivered in North Central dialect, was one trick Watne had learned during her 17 years as a nurse at Altru Hospital. It gives people something to focus on other than the spinning.
Graven sat behind the trainer's controls, and Watne sealed him in and took a seat behind a control desk and flicked a few switches. The box slowly started to turn.
Inside, Graven taxied down the runway of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and climbed into the sky over a low-resolution rendering of Honolulu.
"This thing climbs like the Magic School Bus," he quipped.
Most of the time, the simulator is used to train aviation students how to recognize and respond to spatial disorientation during flight, Watne said, in particular bodily signals that contradict what a pilot's instruments are telling them.
The trainer stimulates pilots' vestibular system — the sensory system in the inner ear that controls balance and spatial orientation — to create sensory illusions that pilots must learn to ignore, lest they panic and lose control of the aircraft.
An overactive vestibular system is also what usually causes motion sickness. Putting airsick pilots like Graven in the trainer essentially serves as a form of exposure therapy, desensitizing their inner ear to the signals that make them ill.
"What causes motion sickness for a lot of people is what you see, what you feel with your inner ear and what you feel with your nervous system aren't matching up," Watne said. "In here is really the only place we can really simulate that with that movement. So the goal here is to simulate that movement and condition your body."
With Graven inside, the box swung around and around at 10 revolutions per minute, rotating 360 degrees on its axis approximately once every six seconds.
From the control desk, Watne kept up the talk while watching Graven from a camera feed that broadcast his face in black-and-white, playing country music over a microphone that broadcast to Graven's headset (another nursing-approved trick) and asking him to rate his nausea on a level from one to 10.
"The key is to not let them see the barf bag," Watne confided. Those were stashed under the control desk.
Graven made it the prescribed 10 minutes before Watne turned off the simulator, warning him in advance about the reverse spins that would come on as the box stopped moving and the fluid in his ear settled.
She dashed off to find mint gum — another treatment for motion sickness — while Graven waited outside the simulator for a few minutes to recover.
"This feeling in that thing was way worse than I've ever felt," he confessed while Watne was away. "It's not fun. It felt like I was spinning crazy fast."
In Watne's training program, Graven was set to go into the simulator seven more times — once more that day, and another three times each the following two days, upping the revolution speed each round.
The motion sickness training, Watne explained later, was like exercise: it was difficult until it wasn't anymore.
The program has been open to the general public for a few months now, but Watne said so far the only people to complete it have been other pilots. A few had tried it and been warded off after one 10-minute session.
She said she's had to turn away some older candidates, like one who wanted to use the simulator ahead of a cruise. (Watne isn't confident the machine would have worked, because the training isn't meant to preempt future motion sickness.)
Another had asked to use the machine because, she said, he told her he'd had a bad fall and had been dizzy ever since.
"Could you imagine someone you know that's maybe a little older, a little more frail, putting them in that? It's like a bad fair ride," Watne said. "But it's very ideal for people like in Jack's position, whose career could depend on this."
Watne returned, gum in hand, and made small talk with Graven before it was time for him to climb into the simulator again, where she boosted the spins to 14 RPMs.
This time though, it was a smoother ride for Graven. He was less nauseous, and climbed out of the simulator with more confidence than before.
"It's not a pleasant thing, but it works, if you want to put the grit into it," Watne said.
By the end of his sessions last week, he told the Herald later, he was up to the full 25 RPMs, with his symptoms considerably reduced.
As of Monday evening, he hasn't flown again, due to extreme cold weather, but plans on flying later this week.
Zeidlik says the program has been remarkably successful for students who put in the work.
"These kids have this dream to fly, and I hate to use the C-word, but Jen is curing these kids of their motion sickness issues," he said.
