Systematic Benchmarking of a Dry Electrode EEG Prototype Against Wet Electrode EEG Systems in Electrophysiological/Cognitive Scenarios

Objective: Recent advances in dry electrode EEG have enabled rapid setup and recording in unconventional scenarios. However, past developments were primarily driven by brain–computer interfaces (BCI), leaving their comparability to wet electrodes in clinical and daily life applications an open question. Here, we developed a new dry EEG system and systematically benchmarked its performance against a commercial wet EEG system across various tasks. Methods: Participants (n = 19) underwent simultaneous recording using both devices. We first collected resting-state EEG under both eyes-closed and eyes-open conditions, followed by a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) task at different flicker frequencies and a motor imagery (MI) task. System performance was evaluated using power spectral density (PSD), signal to noise ratio (SNR), event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP), and single-trial classification accuracy. Results: The two systems performed similarly across different tasks. During the resting state, no statistically significant differences were observed between the two systems in the PSD of the five frequency bands (p > 0.05 in all cases). Similarly, SNR in the SSVEP task showed no significant differences at 8 Hz, 10 Hz, and 12 Hz after correction. For cognitive tasks, classification accuracies were comparable (SSVEP: dry 80.08% ± 7.1% vs. wet 81.10% ± 6.5%; MI: dry 72.46% ± 3.89% vs. wet 70.7% ± 2.37%). Conclusions: The developed dry EEG system can effectively record electrophysiological measurements commonly employed in research and clinical settings, with quality comparable to that of traditional wet EEG systems.