What you are seeing here may in fact be the correct function of the monitor.
Measuring respiration using impedance changes is a difficult thing for a machine to do. Some times the measurement can be distorted by the system seeing changes in impedance caused not by the movement of the chest but rather by the volume of blood in the heart. This can cause monitors to read the respiration rate incorrectly (there is a name for this but my mind has gone blank for the moment). Some monitoring systems deal with this by removing the resp rate is the heart rate and resp rate are within 10% of each other. Try setting a more realistic rate for both HR and RR (ie HR=80 and RR=20) and see if it picks it correctly. If so then that is what the issue was.
Dave
