We present a software (ETHOWATCHER(®)) developed to support ethography, object tracking and extraction of kinematic variables from digital video files of laboratory animals. The tracking module allows controlled segmentation of the target from the background, extracting image attributes used to calculate the distance traveled, orientation, length, area and a path graph of the experimental animal. The ethography module allows recording of catalog-based behaviors from environment or from video files continuously or frame-by-frame. The output reports duration, frequency and latency of each behavior and the sequence of events in a time-segmented format, set by the user. Validation tests were conducted on kinematic measurements and on the detection of known behavioral effects of drugs. This software is freely available at www.ethowatcher.ufsc.br.

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Multiple processors, microcontrollers, or DSPs have been used in embedded systems to distribute control and data flow according to the application at hand. The recent trends of incorporating multiple cores in the same chip significantly expands the processing power of such heterogeneous systems. However, these trends demand new ways of building and programming embedded systems in order to control cost and complexity. In this context, the authors present an overview on multi-core architectures and their inter-core communication mechanisms, dedicated cores used as accelerators, and hardware reconfiguration providing flexibility on today’s multi-core embedded systems. Finally, they highlight tools, frameworks, and techniques for programming multi-cores and accelerators in order to take advantage of their performance in a robust and cost effective manner.