Selected Active Projects

[ Selected Active Projects ]

Project: Decoding Sentiments of Injustice in Chronic Pain: A Natural Language Processing Approach with roBERTa (Dr. Kim and Lab Members)


Effective communication between patients and providers is critical in chronic pain treatment, yet sentiments of injustice often remain unspoken. This project harnesses natural language processing and the RoBERTa model to decode expressions of blame, invalidation, and hopelessness in Reddit chronic pain forums. By identifying these patterns, we aim to bridge gaps in patient-provider communication and develop tools for more empathetic, personalized care. 


Project: Culturally and Linguistically-Specific Pain Expression Library Database

This project seeks to create culturally and linguistically-specific pain language database in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Hmong patients. 

This project is funded by the UW-Madison's Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education.

Project: Pain-Expression Translation with Few-shot In-Context Learning 

Dr. Kim and colleagues in the UW-Madison computer science department seeks to utilize LLM techology to provide translation support for pain experiences for Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, and Korean-speaking individuals.

This project is funded by the Piloting Research Innovation & Market Exploration.


Project: Culture, language, and pain communication among medical providers: A Qualitative Analysis (Dr. Kim and Lab Members)

This project aims to examine the intersection of culture and language in pain communication among three groups of healthcare providers (i.e., physicians, physical therapist, and nurse) and their experiences when working with patients from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. 

Project: Beyond the Margins of Invisibility: A Critical Review and Conceptual Model of Pain Management in Asian Americans (Dr. Kim and Lab Members)

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial/ethnic minority group in the U.S. This project aims to scope out the existing documentation of Asian American chronic pain experiences and critically review the pain management experiences of Asian American patients and their providers.

Project: STOMP - Adaptive Intervention 

In this collaborative project (Screening in Trauma for Opioid Misuse Prevention) with Dr. Randy Brown at Family Medicine,  Kim Lab members will provide pain psychological intervention at UW Hospital and Medical College of Wisconsin Trauma Units.

This project is funded by the Wisconsin Partnership Program.