A system and method for supervising persons with a mental illness, the method comprising the steps of acquiring sensor data related to the person and the person's environment; tracking the acquired sensor data; and recognizing changes in the sensor data indicating the occurrence of an event. The method further comprises the steps of acquiring access to an event database of stored event data entries, each event data entry comprising identification of one of the sensor means, identification of the entity being sensed by the sensor means, and allowable values for the sensor data and recommendations for assistance providing actions to be taken when the received sensor data is out of range from the allowable sensor data; and recognizing the occurrence of an incident in which the received sensor data is outside of the range of the stored allowable sensor data values.