A novel online BCI system using speech imagery and ear-EEG for home appliances control

•First online BCI system for control that utilizes speech imagery (SI) via ear-EEG acquired from a custom-made wearable BCI headphone.•Temporally-stacked multi-band covariance matrix (TSMBC) method is presented to include temporal, spatial, and spectral information to represent neural activities during SI tasks.•The proposed system was used to control an interactive simulated home appliance and tested in both offline and online experiments with eleven participants.•Result suggests that the proposed ear-EEG SI-based BCI system is a promising approach for the wearable BCI for daily life.