Someone will have to explain the difference between these and your average hearing aids, which perform a very similar function, but tuned by an audiologist to your needs.
Because of the way your ears function, the vast majority of people who have hearing impairments have them at specific frequency ranges. Hearing aids do amplify sound somewhat, but they mostly work by pitch shifting voices away from your personal weak spots to wherever your hearing is still strongest. They also do some signal processing to differentiate voice-like noises from other sounds, amplify the voice, and actually mute the non-voice sounds.
For people who have some hearing loss, blanket amplification can be counterproductive and dangerous. Turning up the volume across the board doesn't help at all with differentiating signal from background noise, and can cause what hearing you do have left to degrade much faster than it otherwise might due to the increased stress placed on the ear.
Where are you and why aren't hearing aids available to buy for anyone who wants them? Is that a legislation thing, do hearing aids damage not-as-hearing-impaired people's hearing?
In these very comments someone talks about their hearing aids costing US$6000, being similar in function to the product being discussed.
And folks would be interested for similar reasons. Insurance might not cover the testing that often or the device itself, for instance, or someone might not think they have the time to go to that doctor. Maybe it is only a problem every once in a while, and so on.
And like cheap reading glasses, it might not be a perfect solution, but a solution nonetheless.
If hearing aids are glasses, these are binoculars/telescopes/microscopes.
i.e. off-the-shelf, self-diagnosed, cheap and easy solution for part-time use without getting "medical"
(I say "cheap" because I don't know what the Hearphones will cost but I've helped relatives shop for hearing aids and WOW ... from what I gather, as you step up in price in a company's line of hearing aids, ticking off more boxes in their feature matrix, they're probably just enabled bits of code in an otherwise identical DSP ... and the price increments go like this: $3K-$4K-$5K),
That's pretty self-contradictory.
Is it perhaps about people simply not wanting to admit they have hearing difficulties, these make it a "non-medical" issue and so allow people to address their poor hearing by-passing any potential stigma [they apply to themselves].
My mother needed hearing aids for a long time, but wouldn't get them, seemingly "because they're for old people".
I have a friend who uses hearing aids. They can tune out background noise, focus on directions, turn off hearing, and even listen to magnetic fields (while debugging circuits). I've occasionally felt a bit envious.