Performance and Cost Evaluation of Smart Contracts in Collaborative Health Care Environments

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance and costs of smart contracts in a healthcare blockchain application called TokenHealth, highlighting execution times and economic considerations in different blockchain environments.

Contribution

It introduces TokenHealth, a novel gamified healthcare monitoring system using smart contracts, and provides a performance and cost analysis in public and private Ethereum networks.

Findings

Smart contracts execute in less than a minute for full cycles.

Cost analysis varies significantly between private and public networks.

Preliminary results support feasibility of blockchain-based healthcare monitoring.

Abstract

Blockchain emerged as a solution for data integrity, non-repudiation, and availability in different applications. Data sensitive scenarios, such as Health Care, can also benefit from these blockchain properties. Consequently, different research proposed the adoption of blockchain in Health Care applications. However, few are discussed about incentive methods to attract new users, as well as to motivate the system or application usage by existing end-users. Also, little is discussed about performance during code execution in blockchains. In order to tackle these issues, this work presents the preliminary evaluation of TokenHealth, an application for collaborative health practice monitoring with gamification and token-based incentives. The proposed solution is implemented through smart contracts using Solidity in the Ethereum blockchain. We evaluated the performance of both in Ropsten test network and in a Private instance. The preliminary results show that the execution of smart contracts takes less than a minute for a full cycle of different smart contracts. Also, we present a discussion about costs for using a Private instance and the public Ethereum main network.