The Voltage of Harm: How a Chemical Engineering Journal Published a Surveillance Device for Autistic Children
This is not science. It is institutional failure disguised as innovation.
In 2025, Chemical Engineering Journal published a paper That Should Never Have Existed. It claims to offer a "non-invasive" behavioral monitoring device for autistic children called ColorConnect. Developed by engineers at Vellore Institute of Technology, the device uses triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) to track what colors a child responds to then interprets those responses as emotional states — including aggression.
The language is clinical. The design is polished. The publication is prestigious.
The harm is real.
What this paper — Smart Nb₂C MXene/Ecoflex triboelectric nanogenerator for energy harvesting and IoT-assisted visualization of color-induced behavioral responses in autism — actually represents is not a scientific breakthrough. It is a collapse of ethical review, editorial oversight, disciplinary boundaries and epistemic responsibility. It is a live case study in how autistic children can be monitored and pathologized without consent or communication or even understanding — and how the academic system will reward that process, not question it.
What the Device Does
The technology itself is simple. Four flexible sensors, each linked to a color, send electrical signals when touched. A microcontroller registers those signals and displays the chosen color on a screen. The paper describes this as a way to detect "color-triggered aggression" in autistic children. No behavior is described. No context is given. Just electrical data, reinterpreted as emotion.
The entire premise rests on the assumption that if an autistic child presses the red sensor they might be hostile. If they avoid the yellow one they might be afraid. If they press too hard they might be dysregulated.
In other words a child communicates through motion and the engineers respond by interpreting it through voltage.
What They Never Say
Nowhere in the paper are we told how many children were tested who they were what their communication style was or whether they gave consent. There's no mention of ethical review. No record of participatory input. No attempt to understand what the child was trying to express.
If a child presses a button that's called data. If they press it hard that's called emotional dysregulation. If they avoid one that's called sensory defensiveness.
None of those interpretations are checked. They are simply assigned.
Engineering Without Understanding
The authors are materials scientists not clinicians. Their expertise lies in surface roughness and energy harvesting not behavior or emotion. Yet they make diagnostic claims about autistic experience with total confidence. They do not cite autism researchers. They do not reference participatory studies. They do not acknowledge that autism is more than a sensor problem.
They see movement. They assign meaning. And they publish it as therapy.
This is not interdisciplinary research. It is disciplinary malpractice — and it is enabled by a system that never required them to know better.
An Editorial Board Without Credentials
Chemical Engineering Journal is a high-impact Elsevier publication. Its editorial board boasts experts in electrochemical reactors batteries and waste-to-energy systems. It does not include a single person trained in autism, child development, behavioral psychology ethics, disability studies or participatory methods. And yet this board reviewed and approved a paper on surveilling autistic children's behavior.
They know how to evaluate voltage stability. They do not know how to evaluate whether autistic children are being harmed.
They approved it anyway.
Elsevier's Systemic Permission Structure
The problem does not stop at the journal. Elsevier's leadership structure includes presidents vice presidents and managing directors for product health academic markets and operations. Not one of them intervened to stop this irresponsible immoral unethical paper from being published.
No one asked: is this real care or behavioral control? No one asked: where is the consent? Where is the child? Are any of the researchers experts on autism?
Let's delineate the credentials of the authors for studying autistic children:
• Suresh Kumar Chittibabu — M.Tech in Nanotechnology; teaching assistant and current PhD student in Nanotechnology at Vellore Institute of Technology.
• Arunkumar Chandrasekhar — PhD in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and an associate professor at Vellore Institute of Technology.
• Krishnamoorthi Chintagumpala — PhD in physics and assistant professor of physics at Vellore Institute of Technology.
None of these credentials demonstrate expertise in autism or related behavioral science.
But because the system in which they work is designed to scale output not to question legitimacy it rewards novelty not epistemic integrity.
And when the device works — when the voltage is clean and the colors appear — everyone up the chain calls it innovation.
The Endgame Is Already Here
This isn't a theoretical harm. Autistic children have already been affected. Their sensory responses were captured interpreted and published as evidence of emotional dysfunction. Their behavior was turned into a signal. Their signal was rebranded as therapy.
This is not science. This is a manufacturing pipeline for compliance logic dressed in the language of care.
And unless it's called out it will be replicated.
What Must Be Said
This paper should never have been written. Chemical Engineering Journal's editorial board should never have accepted it. The authors should never have been allowed to conduct this research without oversight. Elsevier should never have built a publishing architecture that lets this happen without accountability. Vellore Institute of Technology never should have allowed this project to begin.
But they did.
And now the record reflects that autistic children can be labeled aggressive for pressing a red button while no one in power asks what that button meant to them.
That is the voltage of harm. And it has already entered the grid.
The next step must be reform. Journals, institutions and publishers must embed ethical review for interdisciplinary work that touches human lives, and give autistic people authority to shape how they are studied.