Papers
13
Total Citations
743
H-Index
10
About
Sophie Makower is a biomedical engineer and rehabilitation researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robotics, stroke recovery, and patient-centered design. Her research has focused primarily on developing and evaluating robotic systems for upper limb rehabilitation following stroke — a field where she has made substantial and lasting contributions over more than a decade. Makower played a central role in the development of the iPAM (Intelligent Pneumatic Arm Movement) system, a dual-robot platform designed to deliver safe, assistive upper limb exercise to stroke survivors across all severities of motor impairment. Her contributions spanned control strategy design, clinical evaluation, and iterative system refinement through to the iPAM MkII randomized controlled trial. A hallmark of her approach is genuine user involvement in device development, recognizing therapist and patient input as foundational rather than supplementary to the engineering process. Her systematic review of outcome measures in robot-assisted exercise trials (253 citations) has become an essential reference for researchers designing future studies in the field. Her work on home-based robotic rehabilitation, notably the hCAAR device (141 citations), helped pioneer the shift toward self-directed, community-based stroke recovery. Altogether, her portfolio — accumulating over 700 citations — has meaningfully shaped how the rehabilitation robotics community approaches both device design and clinical validation.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 6Initial patient testing of iPAM - a robotic system for Stroke rehabilitation30 citations · 2007
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- 8Developing a user interface for the iPAM stroke rehabilitation system21 citations · 2009
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