Abstract: Existing apnea monitors fail to detect clinically important apnea events because they fail to distinguish cardiac artifacts from a chest impedance signal and therefore fail to detect cessation of breathing. A system and method are disclosed that provides improved apnea detection, particularly in a neonatal setting. The disclosed techniques filter out cardiac artifacts from the chest impedance signal, allowing determining a probability of an apnea event. Detection of an apnea event may then be used to trigger an alarm, initiate automatic physical stimulation of the patient, or both.