As the world’s aged population grows many governments are looking to remote healthcare monitoring solutions.It is certainly cheaper to keep the elderly and infirm in their own homes rather than in aged-care facilities.However will these remote and wireless monitoring devices deliver what they promise? The medical profession will need strong evidence before they embrace such techniques.In this paper the authors describe the building of a remote monitoring prototype which uses Motes,a PDA and a network management application to show that commodity-based hardware may provide one answer to the problem of remotely monitoring people in their own homes.Privacy and security issues associated with such monitoring are also discussed.