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Home > News > Clarity
David Lu and Clarity monitor

Clarity

Spring 2015 issue
May 1, 2015 by Paul Preuss
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Spring 2015
  • In this issue

    Features

    In the domain of design

    Jacobs Hall: New home for design innovation

    Design case studies

    Dean’s Word

    Upfront

    • Simplify: The RISC story
    • Seismic song
    • Fostering disruptive technologies
    • Lost and found

    Breakthroughs

    • For clean water
    • The graphene switch
    • The many frontiers of synthetic biology

    Alumni notes

    • Farewell

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design team | David Lu / Deepak Talwar / Hannah Hagen / Baljot Singh

Atmospheric science major David Lu returned from a trip to air-polluted Beijing in 2013 with a sore throat and an idea. He shared the latter with his organic chemistry study partner Hannah Hagen, from the College of Natural Resources. “Wouldn’t it be great to have something you could plug into a phone and read off pollution levels?” he asked. He’d come to the right person: “My vision was to start a business to protect the environment,” says Hagen. Joining forces at the beginning of 2014 with mechanical engineering major Deepak Talwar — Hagen jokes that “we’re from the U.S., China and India, so we have all the world’s pollution covered” — they created Clarity, a key-chain-sized monitor that sends data on fine particulates to the user’s phone and can combine with other users’ data to map an entire city’s pollution picture in real time. With help from the Foundry@CITRIS, including Invention Lab access, plus backing from U.S. and China-based startup accelerator HAXLR8R, Clarity will launch the system in Beijing this October with a thousand users — a hundred or more of them go-everywhere bicycle messengers to establish a baseline.

Topics: Devices & inventions, Design, Sustainability & environment
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