Sleep Health Ant Village

The "Sleep Health" special project launched by Alipay Ant New Village in 2024 is the first lightweight public welfare project in China that links the public's daily sleep behavior, charity donations, and grassroots rural sleep medical science popularization. As of October 2024, it has served 1 Thirty-two village-level clinics in 7 underdeveloped counties are equipped with preliminary sleep screening equipment and large-print popular science manuals, and have provided free sleep health screenings to more than 120,000 rural elderly people. The online rumors of "collecting user privacy" and "disguised diversion to sell sleep aid products" are not true.

The first time I noticed this sector was during the quarterly review last month. I stayed up late for three days and lay down at around 2 a.m. when I touched my phone to turn off the alarm clock and collected the energy from Ant New Village. Suddenly, a reminder popped up: "You have averaged 4 hours and 20 minutes of sleep this week and have donated a sleep science manual to the rural elderly in Cili County, Hunan." I was stunned for a moment, thinking that I could still do charity by staying up late?

I also wondered at the beginning, could it be another gimmick played by Internet charities of "click online and edit offline"? I specifically asked Fa Xiao Akai, who is engaged in charity operations, and he complained about such frivolous projects more than anyone before. This time, he did not complain. He said that he had just followed the project team to several villages in Cili County, Zhangjiajie last week for implementation. He said that many left-behind elderly people had never heard of the word "sleep apnea" in their lives. I always think that snoring loudly means sleeping soundly. Some people can fall asleep even while sitting during the day. They think it is a normal phenomenon as they get older. After the free screening, more than 20 elderly people were found to have moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea. The project team has contacted the county hospital to provide them with follow-up free treatment.

What’s interesting is that I scrolled through the content of this section and didn’t see any advertisements for sleep-aid products. They were all official popular science released by local health commissions, and short videos of village doctors screening the elderly. Even the BGM was in the style of village loudspeakers, which looked quite down-to-earth. By the way, I saw someone say before that this project collects user privacy. I went to read the user agreement. All sleep data is processed anonymously and will not be bound to the user's identity information, nor will it be leaked to third parties. This is much more reliable than many apps that ask for permissions casually.

Of course, it is not all good reviews. Dr. Zhang, who works in the sleep medicine department of a tertiary hospital, has a different view. He said that the user sleep data in this section is collected with the authorization of the mobile phone system and can only be used as a rough reference. The accuracy is far inferior to medical polysomnography, which can easily mislead users. For example, some users snore frequently at night and wake up, but the mobile phone records show that they have slept well for 8 hours, which delays the opportunity to see a doctor. I have a deep understanding of this. There was a time when I always felt unable to wake up. My mobile phone recorded that I slept for more than 7 hours a day. When I went to the hospital for sleep monitoring, I found that my blood oxygen dropped more than 30 times at night, which was mild sleep apnea. If I had just received the data from my mobile phone, I would have been stupid and ignored it.

Last month I went to a village in Suichang, Lishui, to do cultural and tourism research. I happened to see the village doctor at the village clinic handing out sleep science packets to the elderly. It was a canvas bag with cartoon sleeping patterns printed on it. It contained a large-print sleep guide and a simple oximeter that could be clipped to your finger. The village doctor said these were from Ant New Village. It was donated by the sleep health project. Last month, they screened out a 68-year-old Uncle Zhang. His blood oxygen saturation was at its lowest at 81%. He always complained of dizziness. He had been treated for high blood pressure before. Now he has been given a home ventilator at the county hospital. He came for a review two days ago and said that now he is not dizzy when he wakes up in the morning. He can also go to the back mountain to collect half a basket of tea.

To be honest, most of the sleep-related content on the market now sells anxiety, or sells sleep-aid pillows and sleep-aid sprays that cost thousands of dollars. Of course, this sleep health ant village is not perfect. For example, the problem of data accuracy is still not complete. To solve the problem, there are still many rural elderly who cannot use smartphones and cannot participate in online linkages. I heard that the project team is now piloting a program to allow children who work outside the home to bind accounts for the elderly at home. As long as the children achieve their sleep goals, they can redeem a free sleep screening for the elderly at home.

Anyway, I think it is much better to send sleep science and medical resources to the villages that are most in need than teaching young people online every day that "sleeping less than 8 hours is a waste." After all, compared to the sophisticated city dwellers’ sense of sleep ritual, those elderly people who don’t even know that snoring is a disease are the group that needs to be seen the most.