So over the past week, CNA's online documentary arm, CNA Insider, released a series of videos and in-depth stories on poverty in Singapore and around the region.

One of their clips was about Ng Teak Boon, an 85-year-old ice cream seller who parks his cart outside Sim Lim Square every day to sell ice cream sandwiches for $1.50 each.

And one of the things they discovered about Ng is that he sleeps without a mattress or pillow in his one-room rental flat in Geylang.

This via a kind friend of his, a chicken rice hawker known as Madam Chia, who spoke to the team in Chinese.

Here's a transcript of the translation of what she said in the video:

"He was ill previously, and he had leg pains. So I brought him to see the doctor.

I also saw that his head was bleeding. He said he didn't have a mattress or a pillow, so he hit his head while he was sleeping, and it bled.

The doctor said that he had arthritis, and gave him medicine for that.

So I told him to buy a mattress to sleep on, so his legs won't get cold."

This information was picked up by some alert fellas at the Singapore branch of U.S. mattress brand King Koil on Sunday afternoon, a few hours after it was first posted.

They left a comment on the original video:

And quite quickly, they heard from one other commenter who shared the following:

Other folks also left similar comments on their own Facebook post. Which led to this follow-up comment on their page:

Hurray for the good guys at King Koil :) Oh but one more thing, as a couple of others pointed out astutely — in another part of the CNA Insider video, Ng mentioned in passing in Hokkien that he would get bitten by bedbugs:

"When there's no light, when you sleep, bedbugs will come out and bite you."

We hope they remember to help Ng out with that too.

Here's the clip on Ng's story by CNA Insider: