Most elderly people monitoring systems include the detection of abnormal situations, in particular distress situations, as one of their main goals. In order to reach this objective, many solutions end up combining several modalities such as video tracking, fall detection and sound recognition, so as to increase the reliability of the system. In this work we focus on daily sound recognition as it is one of the most promising modalities. We make a comparison of two standard methods used for speaker recognition and verification: Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Experimental results show the effectiveness of the combination of GMM and SVM in order to classify sound data sequences when compared to systems based on GMM.