According to embodiments, methods and systems for determining effort is disclosed. Effort may relate to a measure of strength of at least one repetitive feature in a signal. Effort may also relate to physical effort or work of a process (e.g., respiratory effort) that may affect the signal (e.g., a PPG signal). Effort may be determined through feature analysis of a transformed signal that has been transformed via a continuous wavelet transform. For example, respiratory effort may be determined using a scalogram generated based at least in part on a wavelet transform of a physiological signal and analyzing features of the scalogram.
