The increase in computational power and the networking abilities of home appliances are revolutionizing the way we interact with our homes. This trend is growing stronger and opening a number of technological challenges. From the point of view of distributed systems, there is a need to design architectures for enhancing the comfort and safety of the home, which deals with issues of heterogeneity, scalability and openness. By considering the evolution of domotic research and projects, we advocate a role for Web services in the domestic network. We ground our claim by proposing a concrete architecture for a home in which the health of an elder is monitored. The architecture is implemented on a heterogeneous set of devices, which allows us to evaluate it and draw conclusions on the feasibility of using service-oriented approaches in ubiquitous computing.