Among the initiatives aiming to improve the health status monitoring technologies, the European Commission promotes CHRONIOUS, a 42 months project, started on February 1 st 2008, which involves 19 partners from several countries. The CHRONIOUS project works on an innovative system with intelligent sensors and decision support system for patients and healthcare professionals in the area of chronic diseases. The CHRONIOUS system will monitor patients' vital body parameters, context and environmental variables and patient motion and other activities such as drug intake and dietary habits. The system will assist health care experts and patients by providing tools for health status monitoring and decision support. This paper presents a description of the goal of the project and its background the system architecture and a first prototype with preliminary results and the expected impact.