  Pressure-sensitive mats (PSM) have proved to be useful in the estimation of
respiratory rates (RR) in adult patients. However, PSM technology has not been
extensively applied to derive physiologic parameters in infant and neonatal
patients. This research evaluates the applicability of the capacitive XSensor
PSM technology to estimate a range of RR in neonatal patient simulator trials
conducted under several experimental conditions. PSM data are analyzed in both
the time and frequency domain and comparative results are presented. For the
frequency-domain approach, in addition to estimating RR, a measure of
confidence is also derived from the relative height of peaks in the
periodogram. The study demonstrates that frequency domain analysis of
mean-shifted PSM data achieves the best possible RR estimation, with zero
percent error, as compared to the lowest achievable RMS error of 1.57 percent
in the time domain. The frequency domain approach outperforms the time domain
analysis whether examining raw data or those preprocessed by normalizing,
detrending and median filtering.
