Semiperiodic signals possess an underlying periodicity, but their constituent spectral components include stochastic elements which make it impossible to analytically determine locations of the signal's critical points. Mathematically, a signal's critical points are those at which it is not differentiable or where its derivative is zero. In some domains they represent characteristic points, which are locations indicating important changes in the underlying process reflected by the signal.For many applications in healthcare, knowledge of precise locations of these points provides key insight for analytic, diagnostic, and therapeutic purposes. For example, given an appropriate signal they might indicate the start or end of a breath, numerous electrophysiological states of the heart during the cardiac cycle, or the point in a stride at which the heel impacts the ground. The inherent variability of these signals, the presence of noise, and often, very low signal amplitudes, makes accurate estimation of these points challenging.There has been much effort in automatically estimating characteristic point locations. Approaches include algorithms operating in the time domain, on various transformations of the data, and using different models of the signal. These methods apply a wide variety of techniques ranging from simple thresholds and search windows to sophisticated signal processing and pattern recognition algo-