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.

翻译：辅助听力系统(ALS)能显著提升语音清晰度并降低聆听费力程度。在几乎所有聆听场景中,不仅听障人士,而是几乎所有人都很可能受益于ALS提供的更高信噪比。然而,除重度至极重度听障者外,ALS鲜有其他人群使用。迄今为止,造成这种低采用率的原因尚未得到系统性研究。作者推测,辅助听力技术采用率低的原因包括:(1)无法使用个人自有接收设备,(2)缺乏高保真立体声,(3)接收设备未能提供无遮挡聆听体验,(4)对齐延迟导致的失真,以及(5)无法自动连接可用的辅助听力音频信号。针对上述每个问题,我们提出相应解决方案,旨在为辅助听力技术的广泛采用铺平道路。