Digital Youth & MANGO
4 min read · Last updated 1 October 2026
Digital mental health tools have a well-documented retention problem. People download apps, engage briefly, and then stop — often within the first week. If an intervention cannot hold a user's attention long enough to have an effect, its clinical properties are almost beside the point. The MANGO project, part of the UKRI-funded Digital Youth programme at MindTech, University of Nottingham, set out to test whether a conversational agent could meaningfully improve engagement with a mindfulness app in young people aged 13–24.
The challenge is not building digital mental health tools. It is building ones that people actually keep using.
The Digital Youth Programme
Digital Youth is a UKRI-funded research programme based at MindTech, University of Nottingham, investigating adolescent mental health in digital contexts across eight work packages. The programme spans two themes, digital risk and resilience, and preventative and personalised digital interventions, and brings together researchers from across the UK and internationally. A core commitment of the programme is meaningful involvement of young people throughout the research process, through Sprouting Minds, the programme's Young People's Advisory Group.
MANGO
MANGO is a prototype app built around a talking gecko - a virtual agent designed to check in with young people daily about their use of Headspace, a widely-used mindfulness app, and about their emotional state. The hypothesis was simple: if a young person has a brief, friendly daily conversation about how they are doing and whether they have used the mindfulness app that day, they will be more likely to sustain their engagement with it. The gecko was designed with input from Sprouting Minds and local teenagers, and was intended to feel approachable rather than clinical.
The study tested MANGO in a crossover design: 45 young people each used MANGO alongside Headspace for one week, and Headspace alone for one week, with half completing the conditions in each order to control for learning and fatigue effects. Participants kept a daily diary and completed a survey at the end of each week. The sample was drawn primarily from Rushcliffe Spencer Academy and the University of Nottingham, spanning ages 13–24 (10 aged 13–15, 27 aged 16–18, and 8 aged 19–24), with 69% identifying as female, 21% as male, 5% as another gender, and 5% declining to provide gender information.
Results
The primary outcome was not significant: Headspace usage was similar whether or not participants had access to MANGO that week. Usage also declined in the second week of the study regardless of condition, consistent with a general novelty effect in the study design rather than anything specific to MANGO.
User experience results were more positive. Over half of participants (52.4%) felt they used Headspace at least a little more because of MANGO, and most (71%) found MANGO useful to some extent. The app was rated as at least slightly easy to use by 85.7% of participants, and 42.9% preferred using MANGO alongside Headspace over Headspace alone. The gecko was described as friendly, motivating, and easy to learn, with participants noting the character, scenarios, and gentle pace as appealing features. The main criticisms were speed (many found it slow) and occasional glitchiness; some participants also questioned whether MANGO added value beyond the mindfulness app itself.
Study results were shared with Meta, who were developing their own app and conversational agent, and a paper is being prepared for academic publication. The MANGO prototype is not being developed further in its current form, but the research team considers the underlying concept worth pursuing with a more refined and personalised approach.
Sprouting Minds and WP1
Beyond MANGO, the Digital Youth programme involved Sprouting Minds members in research across the programme. In Work Package 1: a systematic scoping review examining how Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) are applied in collaborative projects involving young people focused on mental health. Sprouting Minds members were invited to co-author the review and to help deliver a debriefing session translating the findings into young-people-friendly language for other Sprouts.
The programme also convened Sprouting Minds to consult on a draft guidance document for Digital Youth researchers on when and how to collaborate with digital companies. The document addressed the tensions between academic independence and the practical necessities of working with industry partners, questions around conflicts of interest, data access, timescales, and the conditions under which collaboration is genuinely in the public interest. Sprouting Minds members contributed to shaping both the questions the guidance posed and the principles it proposed.
My Involvement
I am a member of Sprouting Minds, the Digital Youth programme's Young People's Advisory Group. My primary contribution has been to Work Package 5: the MANGO project, where I was involved in shaping the design of the app and the study alongside other Sprouts and local teenagers. I also contributed to the WP1 scoping review process and to the digital companies guidance consultation.