UnPlug

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  Check in button

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  Manager page

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  Employee page

Inspiration The numbers hit hard when we started researching: 82% of employees are at risk of burnout in 2025, mental health sick leave now accounts for 27% of all sick leave in Denmark, and among young adults that figure jumps to 42%. PROSA called it "a completely unacceptable stress epidemic", and we agreed. One of our team members had actually been thinking about building something like this long before the hackathon even started. The challenge gave us the push to finally make it real. We kept coming back to one uncomfortable truth: the fix for digital exhaustion isn't more digital tools. It's a real human connection. But nobody builds for that.

What it does Unplug is a workplace wellness app that helps IT workers and their teams stay healthy before burnout hits, not after. Employees do a 20-second mood check-in up to 4 times a day. The app tracks their personal wellbeing trend over time, completely privately. If it detects a concerning pattern — consecutive low moods, combined work and home stress, a sharp drop — it quietly surfaces a personalized suggestion from an AI wellness coach, powered by Claude. No alarm bells, no manager notifications. Just a gentle nudge at the right moment. Managers get a separate view showing anonymised, aggregated team health data in real time via SignalR. They see trends, alerts, and which teams are thriving, but never individual responses. Privacy is enforced by design, not policy.

How we built it Frontend: Vue 3 + Vite, deployed on Netlify Backend: ASP.NET Core 8 (C#), deployed on Render via Docker Database: PostgreSQL via Supabase Auth: Auth0 for SSO and JWT validation Real-time: SignalR for live manager dashboard updates AI: Anthropic Claude API for the passive wellness coach and nudge generation The manager and employee views are unified in a single app with a slide toggle — managers get the employee experience first, with org stats one click away. Regular employees never see the toggle at all.

Challenges we ran into Getting the full stack deployed in one hackathon night was genuinely brutal. The Anthropic SDK had a major breaking change between v3 and v4 that cost us several deploy cycles. Supabase's IPv4 compatibility with Render required creative connection string workarounds. And Auth0 JWT validation across a C# backend, Vue frontend, and SignalR hub all needed careful wiring together. We also spent real time debating the ethics of the passive SOS feature — making sure AI analysis of mood patterns never crosses into surveillance territory.

Accomplishments that we're proud of The privacy architecture is something we're genuinely proud of. The manager dashboard enforces a minimum group size of 6 respondents before showing any team data — not as a setting someone can turn off, but baked into the API logic itself. Individual notes and check-ins are never accessible from the manager's side, by design. We also shipped a working full-stack app with real-time features, AI integration, and proper auth in a single night — which felt impossible at 2am. What we learned That deployment is always where you lose the most time. The Anthropic SDK v4 is a breaking change. That Supabase connection strings are surprisingly finicky with Npgsql. And that the most important design decisions in a wellness app aren't about features — they're about what you choose NOT to show.

What's next for Unplug We want to add calendar integration so the app can suggest breaks at natural gaps in your day. Location-aware activity suggestions ("it's sunny in Esbjerg, your team has 45 minutes — walk to the harbour?") are high on the list. A team social leaderboard — Strava for offline hangouts — was in the original vision and we'd love to build it properly. And one of our team members has been thinking about this problem long before this hackathon, so this isn't the last you'll hear of Unplug.

Built With

• computers