Mind Tutor — A Well-Powered UK RCT Finds No Wellbeing Benefit from an AI Chatbot App

Mind Tutor is an AI-chatbot-enhanced wellbeing app built for first-year undergraduates, developed by a team from Oxford Brookes University, London Metropolitan University and the University of Birmingham together with the app developer Syndeo Ltd. The chatbot guides students toward wellbeing content addressing anxiety, low mood, the transition to university, and relationships.

The research team set out to test whether the AI-chatbot-enhanced app could improve first-year student wellbeing, via two adequately powered, pre-registered randomised controlled trials at two UK universities.

Trial 1 enrolled 177 students (92 intervention, 85 control, 6-week follow-up) and Trial 2 enrolled 240 students (125 per arm, 8-week follow-up). Sample sizes were large enough to detect even small effect sizes at a 5% error rate, so a Type II error is unlikely to explain the results. The trial was registered in advance on the Social Science Registry.

Neither trial found a significant effect of Mind Tutor on student wellbeing. Engagement was also low: across both trials, each participating student interacted with the app an average of only two times, and only 80 of the original intervention-arm students in the acceptability sub-study provided usable engagement data, versus 125 in the control group.

The research team published both the null efficacy result and the disappointing engagement data openly in peer-reviewed journals — a genuinely evidence-driven, cautionary case about how easily a well-designed AI wellbeing tool can fail to move outcomes once tested rigorously.