Remote patient monitoring can improve the quality of life of elderly and impaired people, while reducing the costs. Among the most interesting technologies being investigated, computer vision has proved to be very effective in several important scenarios in which conventional sensors fail or are impractical. We propose a computer vision-based wireless sensor system for people remote tracking and monitoring based on low-cost embedded systems able to visually track the patient and detect critical motion and posture patterns, associated with dangerous situations. Motivation for the work and experimental results are provided, showing the effectiveness and the validity of the presented approach.