With a rapidly aging population, the health-care community will soon face a severe medical personnel shortage. It is imperative that automated health monitoring technologies be developed to help meet this shortage. In this direction, we are developing Ayushman, a health monitoring infrastructure and testbed. The vision behind its development is two-fold: first, to develop a wireless sensor-based automated health monitoring system that can be used in diverse situations, from homebased care, to disaster situations, without much customization; second, to provide a testbed for implementing and testing communication protocols and systems. Ayushman provides a collection of services which enables it to perform this dual role. It possess a hierarchical cluster topology which provides a fault-tolerant and reliable system by ensuring that each tier in the hierarchy is self-contained and can survive on its own in case of network partition. Ayushman is being implemented using off-the-shelf and diverse hardware and software components, which presents many challenges in system integration and operational reliability. This is an ongoing project at the IMPACT lab at Arizona State University1, and in this paper, we present our system¢s architecture and some of our experiences in the development of its initial prototype.