AllWise: AI-Facilitated Family Care Decision Platform
A real-time collaboration platform where AI extracts intent, detects conflict, builds consensus, and guides scattered families through complex eldercare decisions, without replacing the human conversation.
The Challenge
When a parent's health declines, families face several urgent decisions at once. Should Dad move to assisted living? Who manages the finances? Which doctor should handle the new diagnosis? Those conversations happen over scattered phone calls, group texts, and tense holiday dinners, if they happen at all.
The problems compound:
- Geographic scatter: siblings live in different states and time zones, so getting everyone on a call at the same time is rarely possible
- Information asymmetry: the sibling who lives closest has different context than the one who manages the finances, and arguments start from incomplete pictures
- Emotional overload: care decisions are hard to talk about, and unstructured conversations fall back into old family dynamics
- No paper trail: decisions get made, or not made, with no record of who agreed to what, so the same argument comes back
- Analysis paralysis: with several options and no framework for comparing them, families stall for months while care needs escalate
Group chats, shared docs, and video calls were not designed for structured decision-making. Families needed a tool built for the job: one that could carry a difficult conversation, get every person's view on the record, and move the group toward a decision they could all support.
Our Solution
We built AllWise, a collaborative platform where families make care decisions together with an AI that facilitates rather than dictates. The platform is live at beallwise.com.
Family Workspaces
Each family gets a private workspace with role-based access (owner, admin, member). Family members join via email invitation with secure token-based onboarding. The workspace organizes everything around decisions, the specific topics the family needs to resolve.
Decision Rooms
Each decision gets its own real-time chat room powered by Socket.io. In the background, the AI works as a facilitator in three layers:
- Intent Extraction: as family members share their thoughts, the AI identifies the needs, concerns, and priorities behind them. "I'm worried about Dad being alone" becomes a structured intent: safety concern, high importance, emotional weight.
- Conflict Detection: when messages reveal tension or opposing views, the AI identifies the conflict pattern and can step in with a reframing question or a request for clarification.
- Consensus Building: the AI generates proposals from the extracted intents, scores how well each proposal aligns with each family member's priorities, and tracks the group's consensus state through the discussion stages.
Structured Decision Tools
Beyond chat, families have anonymous and identified polls (with auto-expiration and tie-breaking), proposal evaluation cards that show how well each option addresses each family member's concerns, and a document vault where financial, legal, and healthcare documents can be shared, auto-categorized, and analyzed by AI.
AI Facilitation Levels
Families can set how involved the AI is: low (mostly observes, surfaces intents), medium (suggests questions, generates proposals), or high (facilitates actively, detects stalls, recommends next steps). At every level, the family makes the decision.
Our Approach
We built AllWise as a Next.js application with a real-time backend, designed around the privacy requirements and the sensitivity of family care coordination.
Data Architecture
The PostgreSQL schema spans 56 Prisma models covering the full lifecycle of collaborative decision-making: Users, Families, FamilyMembers, Decisions, Messages, Intents, Proposals, ProposalEvaluations, ConsensusStates, Polls, PollVotes, AIConversations, Documents, and more. It enforces referential integrity across every relationship while still letting a family discussion take whatever shape it needs.
Real-Time Infrastructure
Real-time delivery runs on two paths: Socket.io on the application server for low-latency messages, plus AWS Lambda WebSocket handlers (connect, disconnect, message) backed by DynamoDB for connection tracking. Updates hold up when family members are on different devices and networks.
AI Pipeline
The AI facilitation system runs as a pipeline:
- Message intake: every message is analyzed for intent signals, emotional tone, and conflict markers
- Intent extraction: structured intents are pulled out with importance rankings and sentiment analysis
- Facilitation triggers: configurable rules determine when the AI should intervene (based on facilitation level, stall detection, conflict escalation)
- Proposal generation: the AI turns intents into concrete proposals with alignment scores
- Consensus tracking: the system monitors group alignment through the discussion stages toward resolution
Security & Privacy
Family care discussions contain deeply personal information. Authentication uses JWT + Iron Session with httpOnly cookies. Email verification is required for all accounts. Invitation tokens are single-use and time-limited. Document access is controlled per family, with S3 pre-signed URLs for secure file delivery. All sensitive data transmission uses encryption in transit.
Email & Communication
Transactional emails (invitations, verification, password reset, meeting reminders) use the Resend API with custom branded templates, backed by cross-account AWS SES for reliable delivery from the beallwise.com domain.
Results & Outcomes
AllWise launched at beallwise.com with a complete feature set for family care decision-making.
Platform Capabilities
- Full family workspace lifecycle: creation, invitation, role management, and settings, with Stripe subscription billing
- Real-time decision rooms with WebSocket-powered messaging, file sharing, and AI facilitation
- Three-layer AI system: intent extraction, conflict detection, and consensus building, each configurable to a family's comfort level
- Structured voting with anonymous polls, auto-expiration, reminders, and tie-breaking
- Document vault with hierarchical folders, auto-categorization (financial, legal, healthcare), visibility controls, and AI-powered text extraction and summarization
- Private AI chat: each family member can hold separate conversations with the AI to work through their thoughts before sharing with the group
- Calendar integration for scheduling family meetings with timezone-aware reminders
- Care resources library with searchable articles and guides
Technical Delivery
- 56 data models in a PostgreSQL schema that captures the full complexity of collaborative decision-making
- Dual real-time architecture: Socket.io + AWS Lambda WebSockets with DynamoDB connection tracking
- Model-agnostic AI: OpenAI GPT-4o primary, with AWS Bedrock (Claude) ready as an alternative
- E2E test coverage with Playwright across authentication, decision, and collaboration flows
- AWS infrastructure: Amplify hosting, RDS PostgreSQL, S3 storage, Lambda functions, DynamoDB, SES email
AllWise gives a family one place to work through a care decision, with a record of what was raised, what was proposed, and where each person stood. The AI adds structure to the conversation, and the family makes the call.
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