Monitoring patients in intensive care units is a critical task. Simple condition detection is generally insufficient to diagnose a patient and may generate many false alarms to the clinician operator. Deeper knowledge is needed to discriminate among alarms those that necessitate urgent therapeutic action. We propose an intelligent monitoring system that makes use of many artificial intelligence techniques: artificial neural networks for temporal abstraction, temporal reasoning, model based diagnosis, decision rule based system for adaptivity and machine learning for knowledge acquisition. To tackle the difficulty of taking context change into account, we introduce a pilot aiming at adapting the system behavior by reconfiguring or tuning the parameters of the system modules. A prototype has been implemented and is currently experimented and evaluated. Some results, showing the benefits of the approach, are given.