We are now living in an era where lower-cost, higherperformance technology has the potential to become truly ubiquitous as it integrates seamlessly within our everyday lives. It could be argued that the realization of these concepts will be most significant towards promoting independent living and increasing the quality of life for the rising numbers of older people and with it, the prevalence of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia. Such illnesses are placing significant and unsustainable pressure upon health and social care services across the globe. In an effort to help to alleviate some of these pressures, efforts are being made to investigate the potential to embed assistive technology within home environments and beyond. Indeed, studies have shown that older people and those with chronic illnesses often prefer to remain living within their own homes for as long as possible. A challenge in supporting their independent living is to ensure that technology driven health and social care solutions provide an equal quality of care when compared to institutional care facilities. Key to this success is the provision of ‘smart’ homes, which are able to provide automated and personalized levels of support, based on the profiles of each occupant. Realizing a smart home is, however, not a straightforward task. They are typically equipped with a large number of sensors, which are attached to household objects or embedded within appliances hence supporting the ability to track occupant’s locations and their interaction with appliances. These sensors generate a large amount of data, which must then be organized and mined using computation intelligence approaches to extract features that contribute most to the recognition of particular behaviors, environmental changes or to identifying activities of daily living. A large body of research in this area now exists; however, we have not yet witnessed the advent of smart homes on a large scale of deployment. What is needed is a coordinated and collaborative approach to technology development based on a user-centered design methodology with strong industrial and health and social care services support to ensure the large-scale uptake, which is currently lacking. The objectives of this Special Issue were firstly to review the most recent advances in the development of solutions for chronic disease prevention and management from a technology perspective and secondly to consider the impact that such solutions are having on health and social care provision. The consolidation of such an issue aims to provide a collection of work with the opportunity of exchanging new ideas and sharing lessons learnt. The Theme of the Special Issue follows the theme of the 10th International Conference On Smart homes and health Telematics (ICOST) that was held in Italy in 2012. The focus of the conference was related to considering the impact, which health technologies are currently having at a real deployment level in trying to address the issues surrounding long term chronic illnesses. This Special issue includes extended papers from a number of notable authors whose work was well received by delegates attending ICOST 2012. The overarching aim of the Special Issue was to provide interested readers with an insightful overview into state of the art approaches being applied to provide technology support for long-term chronic illness. Specifically, this Special Issue presents the latest research findings from an international body of authors originating from Spain, France, United Kingdom, Canada, M. Donnelly (*) :C. Nugent School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster at Jordanstown, Shore Road, Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim BT37 0QB, UK e-mail: mp.donnelly@ulster.ac.uk