Social progress and demographic changes favor increased life expectancy and the number of people in situations of dependency. As a consequence, the demand for support systems for personal autonomy is increasing. This article outlines the vision @ home project, whose goal is the development of vision-based services for monitoring and recognition of the activity carried out by individuals in the home. Incorporating vision devices in private settings is justified by its power to extract large amounts of data with low cost but must safeguard the privacy of individuals. The vision system we have designed incorporates a knowledge base containing information from the environment, parameters of different cameras used, human behavior modeling and recognition, and information about people and objects. By analyzing the scene, we infer its context, and provide a privacy filter which is able to return textual information, as well as synthetic and real images.