Assistive listening systems (ALSs) dramatically increase speech intelligibility and reduce listening effort. It is very likely that essentially everyone, not only individuals with hearing loss, would benefit from the increased signal-to-noise ratio an ALS provides in almost any listening scenario. However, ALSs are rarely used by anyone other than people with severe to profound hearing losses. To date, the reasons for this poor adoption have not been systematically investigated. The authors hypothesize that the reasons for poor adoption of assistive listening technology include (1) an inability to use personally owned receiving devices, (2) a lack of high-fidelity stereo sound, (3) receiving devices not providing an unoccluded listening experience, (4) distortion from alignment delay and (5) a lack of automatic connectivity to an available assistive listening audio signal. We propose solutions to each of these problems in an effort to pave the way for mass adoption of assistive listening technology by the general public.

翻译：辅助听力系统（ALSs）能显著提升语音清晰度并降低聆听负担。在几乎所有聆听场景中，ALS所提供的信噪比提升不仅惠及听力受损者，也很可能使他人受益。然而，除重度至极重度听力损失人群外，辅助听力系统的实际使用率极低。迄今为止，造成这种低采纳率的原因尚未得到系统研究。作者假设，辅助听力技术低采纳率的原因包括：（1）无法使用个人自有接收设备；（2）缺乏高保真立体声；（3）接收设备无法提供无遮挡聆听体验；（4）对齐延迟导致的失真；（5）缺乏与可用辅助听力音频信号的自动连接。本文针对上述问题逐一提出解决方案，旨在为辅助听力技术的大众普及铺平道路。