Sleep Health Technology Co., Ltd.

At present, domestic sleep health technology companies that can achieve commercial sustainability and truly solve users' sleep pain points have essentially jumped out of the misunderstanding of "selling hardware = providing sleep services" and have gone through the entire link of "hardware light monitoring - data trend interpretation - personalized solution implementation - long-term effect iteration", rather than relying on the concept of stacking a single product to harvest traffic. **

To be honest, I have been involved in this industry for almost 4 years, and I have seen too many start-ups that fell by the wayside, and I have also stepped on many IQ tax pitfalls. In the past two years, I spent more than 3,000 on a smart mattress from an Internet celebrity brand, which was said to be able to automatically adjust the softness and hardness and monitor sleep data in real time. The results were fresh except for the first week after I bought it. I opened the APP every day to check my sleep score. I never touched the supporting software again. The mattress adjustment function was troublesome after using it twice. In the end, it was no different from the ordinary spring mattress that my family had used for five years.

There are actually two schools in the industry that have been arguing for several years. One is the "hardware school" with a background in consumer electronics. They think that as long as the sensor accuracy is high enough and the hardware parameters are full, the problem can be solved. I went to Shenzhen to participate in an industry exhibition before and saw a sleep monitoring belt made by a company. The sampling rate is 120 times per second. It can even measure which muscle exerts the first force when you turn over. However, when I asked about the follow-up services, in addition to the sleep report that can generate more than ten pages in the APP, there is only a monthly subscription of 9.9 yuan for the white noise sleep aid membership. The user has a bunch of data accurate to milliseconds and has no idea whether the lack of deep sleep is due to drinking milk tea before going to bed or the mattress is too hard. Naturally, it is discarded after two uses.

The other group is the "service group" with a medical background. Many of the founders are sleep doctors themselves. They first promote standardized CBT-I cognitive behavioral therapy. This thing is indeed recognized by the medical community as a golden solution for the non-drug treatment of insomnia. However, the problem is that most of them take it. The service relies entirely on users filling in sleep log feedback every day. There is no continuous monitoring data to support it. Program adjustments rely entirely on users’ subjective descriptions. A friend of mine bought a semi-annual sleep guide from a service company. After filling in the log for three days, he gave up because it was too troublesome. Thousands of dollars were wasted.

However, a small company I came into contact with in Hangzhou last year gave me a lot of surprises. They are not large, with only more than 20 people. They neither follow the trend and make smart mattresses that cost thousands of yuan, nor sell consulting services that cost thousands of yuan. Instead, they first gave out free entry-level mattresses that cost less than 100 yuan to insomniac elderly people in three surrounding communities. The first-class sleep monitoring bracelet collects basic data for two consecutive weeks, and then cooperates with general practitioners in community hospitals to make targeted program adjustments: when encountering elderly people who wake up too much at night, which leads to sleep fragmentation, they use a sensor night light customized by them in cooperation with the bathroom factory, and then use a small program to recommend drinking water reminders to the elderly family members one hour before going to bed.； If you encounter pain in the waist and legs and have trouble sleeping due to frequent turning over, we will provide you with custom-fit thin memory foam pads. The monitoring data of the wristband will be used every half month to see the adjustment effect. If it is not suitable, change the plan in time. At the end of last year, they showed me the pilot data. The proportion of users in the three communities who subsequently repurchased related products and services exceeded 60%, which is much higher than the industry average of less than 10%. To put it bluntly, it combines the advantages of the two groups. It does not worry about whether the hardware is medical grade, nor does it push standardized services that users cannot insist on. It first obtains the users’ real sleep trends, and then provides solutions that can be used on tiptoe.

Speaking of which, I have to mention a controversy that has been raging in the industry to this day: Do non-medical-grade consumer-grade sleep monitoring data have any reference value?

Many practitioners with a medical background are particularly resistant to consumer-grade hardware, saying that the error between deep sleep duration measured by consumer-grade bracelets and medical polysomnography can be up to 25%, and it is simply irresponsible to use this kind of data to make plans. However, many practitioners who do user research that I have contacted feel that for more than 90% of ordinary users who have poor sleep quality and do not have pathological insomnia, there is no need for sleep data accurate to the minute. As long as they can get "You have been lying down for more than 40 minutes to fall asleep in the past half month, and you wake up around 3 a.m." A trend conclusion is enough - after all, most people don't sleep well, and it is not a complicated disease at all. Either they use their mobile phones for too long before going to bed, or the mattress is too hard and the bedroom is too bright. Using low-cost consumer-grade hardware to understand the long-term trends and then make targeted adjustments is much more cost-effective than going to the hospital for sleep monitoring that costs thousands of dollars.

I also had a medical polysomnography test last year. I had more than a dozen electrodes attached to my body. I was afraid that the electrodes would fall off when I turned over at night, which made me sleep worse than usual. Later, I wore an ordinary smart bracelet for continuous testing for a month, and I can really tell that as long as I sleep for more than half an hour before going to bed. Funny short videos, the time it takes to fall asleep is at least 20 minutes longer, and the duration of deep sleep is half an hour shorter. This trend is accurate. Following this adjustment, I changed the habit of browsing my mobile phone before going to bed to listening to audio books. The time to fall asleep is indeed much shorter. For me, this kind of non-medical grade data is useful enough.

Of course, there are a lot of pitfalls in the industry now. Many companies that claim to be sleep health technology are essentially just selling products. The "quantum sleep pillow" and "biowave sleep aid" are so popular that they are just ordinary pillows with a vibration motor. They are sold several times more expensive than ordinary pillows. It's pure IQ tax. Ordinary consumers don't actually need to look at those fancy parameters when choosing. They just look at one thing: after the company sells the product, does it have follow-up supporting services? Does it dare to show you real user feedback on long-term use? If the product is sold out, contact will be lost, and no one will buy it.

After all, there is no universal solution to the problem of sleep. Some people can sleep until dawn by changing to full blackout curtains, while others need to adjust their work and rest for half a year to improve. A good sleep health technology company should not be a salesperson. It should be a sleep "housekeeper" for users. It does not need to engage in high-level concepts and really helps users find adjustment methods that suit them. This is the foundation for the long-term development of this industry.