Monitoring the respiratory rate (RR) is important in many clinical and non-clinical situations but it is
difficult in practice, for existing devices are obtrusive, bulky and expensive. The extraction of the RR from
the routinely acquired electrocardiogram (ECG) has been proposed lately. Two approaches exist, one
exploiting the modulation of the heart rate by the respiration, known as the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and the other using the modulation by the respiration of the R-peak amplitudes (RPA). In
this study, the weighted multi-signal oscillator based band pass filtering (W-OSC) algorithm is applied
to track the common frequency in the RSA and RPA waveforms simultaneously, as an estimate of the
instantaneous RR. On the public PhysioNet Fantasia data set, it is shown that the presented method is
automatic, instantaneous and comparable in accuracy to the state-of-the-art.