  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.
