Sound masking is increasingly used to meet the HIPAA requirements for speech privacy in healthcare facilities, as well as to improve hospital survey scores, according to an article on the FacilityCare website.
Sound masking technology uses loudspeakers to distribute an engineered background sound throughout a facility, raising its ambient level in a controlled fashion, the article said.
Conversations are either entirely covered up or their intelligibility is reduced, improving privacy.
The effectiveness of the masking sound is directly related to the sound masking system’s ability to closely match the specified curve — also called a “spectrum” — throughout the space in which it is installed.
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