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(b) Financial transparency laws such as Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), etc. that created a need to pro- tect confidential executive deliberations.
(c) National security/anti-terrorism laws such as the USA Patriot Act which created a need for clear definitions related to “confidential” and “secure” speech privacy.
(d) Healthcare reform laws that created a need for objective privacy metrics to enable the implemen- tation of electronic patient records and improve the environment of care while preserving patients’ rights to privacy.
(e) Energy independence and economic security laws such as the Energy Policy Act, the Department of Energy Final Rule, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA). When coupled with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership on Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating program, creates a clear and urgent need for definitions and an understanding of the role of acoustics and speech privacy within the complex concept of “environmental quality.” The LEED Green Building Rating System has now been licensed to eighty countries around the world.
(f) Advanced technology development laws such as
the Bush Administration’s 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003 that has created a stream of new, often “green” materials and technologies that impact acoustics and challenge traditional methods for evaluating speech privacy.
With so many catalysts, Working Group S12/WG44 bal- ances a continuing need to do three things: (1) to engage and sustain a broad, active and international membership that represents all of the varied constituencies (policy, law, medi- cine, architecture and design, engineering, information tech- nology, research and development, manufacturing, distribu- tion, etc.) whose members are interested in these several, dis- parate areas; (2) create consistent guidelines and standards that reconcile the differences between the conflicting needs of the different constituencies and government agencies involved in these areas; and (3) sustain the rapid pace of development of standards and guidelines while simultane- ously coping with the need for numerous and lengthy periods of extensive public review and inevitable change that are nec- essarily part of the standards development process.
Current standards development activity
The draft standard has the usual grouping of sections: scope, references, definition of terms, descriptors and meth- ods for evaluating speech privacy, recommended values for these descriptors based on adjacencies, and methods for in
Fig. 1. Cover of the 2006 edition of the 60-year-old, code-level American Institute of Architects Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities.
situ evaluation for compliance purposes. The most signifi- cant challenge is to determine the relationship between speech privacy descriptor values and speech privacy expecta- tions by patients and healthcare staff and enforcement offi- cers. Much of this work will draw upon a large history of office speech privacy work first comprehensively enunciated by Cavanaugh, Farrell, Hirtle and Watters2 as well as Hirtle,
34 Watters, and Cavanaugh. These and other papers by Pirn
and Young5 have formed nearly the entire body of office speech privacy knowledge used over the several decades since then. In addition, the Working Group will consider the recent work by Gover and Bradley6 in speech security at the Building Research Institute of the National Research Council of Canada.
We speculate that speech privacy needs and descriptors for healthcare will follow the forms that developed for office speech privacy, but the levels of speech privacy categorization might be expanded to include both lower and higher classifi- cations than the “normal” and “confidential” speech privacy classifications very familiar to those working in architectural acoustics.
Ultimately, there are several questions that need answer- ing—when federal legislation requires “confidentiality,” does this mean “confidential” (AI<0.05) speech privacy customar- ily used in office acoustics or perhaps the less demanding “normal” (0.05<AI<0.15) speech privacy classification? Should, or would, privacy expectations be influenced by the setting, i.e., should a privacy descriptor for a specific classifi- cation of privacy in an open-plan space be the same as that
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