arXiv:2608.21379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Student burnout is highly prevalent in higher education, with reported rates ranging from 12% to over 70% and consistently exceeding those of the working population - yet it is typically identified only retrospectively, after academic decline has already occurred. A contributing factor is that students have little structured visibility into their own study behaviour, and existing productivity tools record activity without interpreting it. This paper presents RIACT (Record, Insight, Analyze, Coach, Track), a web-based application that combines structured study session logging with a hybrid AI architecture to surface personalized insights and early burnout signals. Students log sessions by location and time; the system computes net focus time by accounting for breaks, detects burnout signals through transparent, deterministic rules operating on week-over-week behavioural comparisons, and uses a large language model - constrained to a fixed output schema - to contextualize patterns and generate personalized recommendations. The design embeds responsible AI principles throughout: warnings are governed by auditable rules rather than model judgement, all output is framed as an observation rather than a diagnosis and data collection is limited to self-logged behavioural fields. We describe the system's design rationale, situate it within the literature on student burnout and explainable AI in education and propose an evaluation framework for validating its behavioural signals against established burnout instruments.
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