The purpose of this study is the exploration of a new noninvasive method for detecting heart and respiratory rates using pressure transducers and medical tubing placed on a persons chest. This device is intended to replace the individual who manually and visually takes vital signs in an emergency mass casualty situation. Instead it would provide a light weight device that can be carried in to the field, applied rapidly, and has the potential to be networked in such a way that one medical person can monitor 5-6 casualties simultaneously, thus acting as a force multiplier. The first step in the project was the validation of using pressure transducers to detect the desired signals. After the initial validation, the first board mount rendition of the system was implemented on a printed circuit board. An experiment was designed and carried out using a coil of latex tubing placed on a medical test mannequin that is used for breathing simulations. The pressure transducer read the change in pressure in this tubing and data was collected for several different respiratory rates. The results of this experiment are definitive. Respiratory rate can be derived using signal processing of the raw signal output from the system.