I did lie down and close my eyes for a while, but using the wearable I was happily eating lunch in a little over an hour. However, though I did get sick, I do believe the gadget helped me recover faster-typically, I would have been sick all afternoon, and needed at least a two-hour nap to reset my stomach.
The only time I medicated (and got sick anyway) was for a snorkel trip, not exactly a situation in which I could wear an external electrical device. I hardly turned it on after the first day-cruise ships are pretty stable until they aren’t-at which point, I’ve learned on past trips, it’s too late to medicate. Let’s just say I took far more advantage of the nightlife this time, not having to fight the meclizine sleepies. Since then, I’ve been using the ReliefBand in just about every situation in which I would normally pre-medicate with meclizine. And five minutes later he was madly texting (I’m not so sure that’s a win, but at least he wasn’t sick.) “I have that gadget in my purse if you want to try it.” I talked him through putting it on. About half way there he put his phone down and stared straight ahead. He isn’t super sensitive to motion, though mountain roads sometimes affect him, and checking his phone for texts doesn’t help. I decided to give myself five minutes to stabilize as we walked to the theater, after that, I was fine.Ī few days later, I was driving my son over to Santa Cruz on Highway 17-a twisty mountain road, the motion effects worse on a sunny day as the light strobes through trees. I turned the ReliefBand off as soon as we parked, and felt that momentary pre-nausea feeling. “That’s the first time we’ve ever gone anywhere that you haven’t at least sighed, if not complained, when I came to a fast stop,” he told me. And my husband was feeling pretty good as well. It was a hairier drive to the city than usual that evening-due to road closures for Super Bowl events in San Francisco, we had to turn the navigation over to Waze, which sent us winding through narrow alleys and making frequent turns to get to our destination. Push the on button push it again to raise the level of electricity until you feel it down to your middle fingertip: there are five levels, I felt a noticeable, but not uncomfortable, tingle at level 2. The device isn’t intuitive to use even though the brochure says “slip it on your wrist” you have to follow instructions, though they are straightforward: measure two finger widths below the crease of your wrist and feel for a spot between the two tendons, rub in some of the conductive gel included with the product, then strap it on. I decided to instead try the ReliefBand, warning my husband that if it doesn’t work it could be a rough evening. I hate navigating the traffic and the city driving, so my usual plan would have been take a meclizine earlier in the day and hope it doesn’t knock me out during the show. That evening, my husband and I had tickets a show in San Francisco in rush hour, that’s anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half away, much of it in heavy traffic. I first got an evaluation unit from ReliefBand in February.
What you probably really want to know is if the $90 gadget works. And the various companies that owned the technology along the way made occasional attempts to break into the consumer market. It turns out that someone did-about 20 years ago, and it’s been marketed for at least a decade as a prescription device to hospitals.
I was sure that it wasn’t going to work, because if this really were possible, wouldn’t someone have thought of it years ago? So when I spotted the ReliefBand booth at CES this year, touting a wearable that uses electric pulses to block the neurological signals that kick off motion sickness, I was eager to try the device-but was more than skeptical. (That’s a big problem for a journalist trying to cover consumer electronics these days.) I’ve tried chomping on ginger and ginger-filled capsules, pushing on acupressure points, and all sorts of prescription and non-prescription pharmaceuticals, settling on meclizine as my go-to trading off 24 hours of annoying but not intolerable sleepiness and a slightly fuzzy brain for a calm stomach. Virtual reality? Forget it, even with a double-dose of sleep-inducing medication, I can only spend about eight seconds in VR without the warning signs of an impending wave of nausea. Non-medicated, I can’t be a passenger in a car for more than 10 minutes of city driving-5 minutes on a windy road-without feeling sick.
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