Sleep Health Ant Village

The core essence of Sleep Health Ant New Village is a sinking digital public welfare project jointly implemented by Ant Group, county health departments and many domestic key laboratories of sleep medicine. It breaks away from the general "Young People's Sleep Aid Guide" routine on the market and packages sleep screening, science popularization, and grassroots medical personnel training to counties, villages and towns where medical resources have been weak in the past. As of mid-2024, it has covered nearly 2 million village residents in 17 counties across the country.

The first time I came into contact with this project was when I went to Suichang, Lishui, for a pilot survey last spring. As soon as I entered the canteen at the entrance of the village, I met the proprietress, Sister Zhang, squatting on the steps and eating steamed buns. Seeing us coming with the village doctor, she waved from afar: "Come in and sit down. I don't have a headache lately. That bracelet of yours really works!"

Sister Zhang has been running a canteen for more than ten years. She stays up until 1 a.m. every day to close the shop, and goes to town to buy goods at 5 a.m.. She has had a headache for almost two years. She always thought it was high blood pressure. She took several medicines but it didn't feel better. I had never thought that this was related to poor sleep. After all, in the common perception of the villagers, "If you can't sleep, you are worried, which is not a disease." It wasn't until the project was implemented that the village doctor was provided with a batch of simple sleep monitoring bracelets and screened the villagers for free. It was discovered that Sister Zhang's blood oxygen concentration dropped to as low as 82% every night, indicating that she had moderate obstructive sleep apnea. Later, she adjusted her sleeping position as the doctor said and spent dozens of yuan to buy a basic anti-snoring device. Within a month, most of her headaches were relieved.

To be honest, I used to think that sleep health was something that only white-collar workers in the city would think about: melatonin, sleep devices, and mindfulness meditation seemed irrelevant to the rural residents who have to work in the fields every day, open tuck shops, and take care of the elderly. It wasn’t until I ran a few pilot trips that I discovered that this was not the case. The project team has done some research before and found that 42% of village residents in the pilot counties have varying degrees of sleep disorders, and 80% of them have never sought medical treatment for sleep problems. Many people's high blood pressure, unstable blood sugar, and emotional irritability are all caused by sleep.

Of course, the controversy over this project in the industry has never stopped. When I attended an industry forum last month, a public health expert from a university said bluntly: The resources of grassroots public health are already tight. The priority is to ensure the management of chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes, as well as routine physical examinations for women, children, and the elderly. Sleep health is a "non-rigid need", and investing so much manpower and material resources is too low in cost performance. But I turned around and asked Lao Li, the village doctor in Suichang, and he disagreed with this statement. He said that last year there was a 72-year-old grandmother in the village. She changed three or four types of antihypertensive drugs, and her blood pressure kept rising and falling. Later, after doing a sleep screening, I found out that the grandmother had been unable to sleep every day for half a year because her husband had left. For 3 hours, the sympathetic nerves were excited for a long time, and of course her blood pressure could not be stabilized. Later, the village doctor came to her home every week to chat with her for half an hour, and taught her to soak her feet in hot water before going to bed, and not to listen to the radio in bed. Within two months, my grandma’s blood pressure stabilized within the normal range, and she even stopped taking the painkillers she used to take.

In fact, the most interesting thing about this Ant New Village project is that it does not have any high-level standardized processes, but is all based on the needs of the grassroots. I once participated in a training for village doctors. The courseware I originally prepared included a lot of professional terms, such as "sleep latency" and "rapid eye movement period." I was stopped after just 10 minutes by the village doctor below: "We can't remember what you said, and we can't explain it to the people. Just teach us how to judge this person's sleep problems." We need to transfer them to the county hospital, so we can teach them how to sleep well without spending money." Later, the courseware was revised overnight, and finally it was reduced to a one-page judgment standard, and there are five tips to help sleep without spending money: soak your feet 10 minutes before going to bed, don't play with mobile phones, don't drink strong tea, the height of the pillow is about the same as your fist, etc., it is easy to remember and useful.

Also during the last training, a village doctor from Songyang suggested a home-made method. He said that the elderly in the village had insomnia, so they put dried mugwort in pillowcases, and it worked for most of them. The project team actually brought this method back to the Provincial Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine for testing, and found that the volatiles of mugwort do have a certain sedative and soothing effect. It has now been added to the popular science manual for villagers. They also specially found a manufacturer to make a batch of affordable mugwort pillows, which cost less than 20 yuan. Villagers can get whatever they want. Don't tell me, I took two of them and gave them to my mother. She had suffered from insomnia for more than half a year during menopause, and now she can sleep through the night, which is an unexpected bonus.

Now this project is still being rolled out to more counties. There is no perfect template, and various small problems often arise: For example, some villagers feel uncomfortable wearing monitoring bracelets, so the project team changed it to scanning the code to fill in a simplified version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Scale. After filling in 10 questions, a preliminary report will be issued; some village doctors thought it was troublesome to visit the door to educate people, so they added sleep knowledge to the loudspeaker broadcast at the head of the village, so that they can listen to it while doing farm work.

In fact, this is how we provide sinking health services. There is no standard answer. Just like when I left last time, Sister Zhang gave me a bottle of bayberry wine that she brewed herself. She said that I slept well now, that I didn’t fall asleep while riding an electric bike when buying goods, and that the business of the canteen was much better than before. It can help ordinary people get a good sleep, which is more effective than any lofty ideas.