Clinical trial NCT03298139: THE INFLUENCE OF GRAVITY
Official title: THE INFLUENCE OF GRAVITY ON TARGET CUEING DURING VISUAL SEARCH USING AUGMENTED REALITY
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: NA
Conditions: Healthy Volunteers
Lead sponsor: University Hospital, Caen
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2017-10-02
Enrollment: 18
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 67
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: NA
Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: Although most ground studies showed that an egocentric reference frame better supports spatial orientation, it is not proven it will be the same during weightlessness.

Although it might justify that visuomotor performance will be better supported by egocentric target cueing under altered gravity conditions, the fact that exocentric target cueing induces less head movements and called for least attentional and physiological workload could be the key factors for a more efficient task localization process. Moreover, weightlessness can induce spatial disorientation, which can be additionally influenced by the intrinsic and extrinsic spatial reference frames (Gurfinkel et al., 1993; Glasauer \& Mittelstädt, 1997, 1998; Harm et al., 1998; Lipshits et al. 2005). We expect that during weightlessness the workload will be the key factor and thus we hypothesize that an exocentric target cueing will outperform egocentric target cueing.

To test this hypothesis, and find out which presentation scheme for target cueing (EGO, EXO, ED) contributes most to an efficient visual search, performance to a visuomotor task will be evaluated during parabolic flights in normogravity (1g), hypergravity (1.8g) and microgravity (0g). The visuomotor performance will be assessed by a multi-directional tapping task as defined by ISO9241-9, which requests for motor responses by aimed pointing movements. Besides analyzing the pointing performance, different workload indices will be additionally assessed to evaluate the effort spent on visuomotor coordination. The attentional workload will be evaluated by the performance of a secondary task (visual reaction-time task), which needs to be conducted in parallel to the visuomotor task. Furthermore, the workload will be also assessed subjectively by the NASA TLX rating scale and physiologically, by analyzing the heart rate variability (HRV).


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Healthy volunteers (men or women)
* Aged from 18 to 67
* Affiliated to a Social Security system and, for non-French resident, holding a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC)
* Who accepted to take part in the study
* Who have given their written stated consent
* Who has passed a medical examination similar to a standard aviation medical examination for private pilot aptitude (JAR FCL3 Class 2 medical examination). There will be no additional test performed for subject selection.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Person who took part in a previous biomedical research protocol, of which exclusion period is not terminated
* Pregnant women

Primary outcomes:
measure: visuomotor performance
timeFrame: baseline
measure: common external display guidance method (ED)
timeFrame: baseline
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Caen
country: France
facility: CHU de Caen
Study officials:
References: