The proliferation of mobile devices has led to their integration into a huge number of assistive environments where they perform a key role. Pervasive environments, built over wireless infrastructures, introduce new possibilities in the healthcare sector realizing the anytime-anywhere access to medical information paradigm. Towards this direction pervasive technology can be deployed in assistive environments, such as home monitoring for elderly or patients. In this paper we describe a policy based architecture that utilizes software agents and wireless sensor technologies to enable remote monitoring of patients and elderly people. We also discuss the technical challenges which directed the decisions with respect to the design of our software prototype architecture. These decisions mainly focus on providing continuous feedback of the patient's condition, while transferring encrypted versions of the necessary medical information in accordance with the increased security and privacy requirements. The presented prototype implementation utilizes advanced network management technologies and software agent engineering in order to operate effectively, to achieve interoperability through the different modules and in order to comply with the imposed (by the legislative framework) increased security and privacy requirements.