Performance and Cost Evaluation of Smart Contracts in Collaborative Health Care Environments
This work addresses performance and cost issues in blockchain for health care, but it is incremental as it builds on existing blockchain applications with added incentives and evaluation.
The paper tackled the lack of incentive methods and performance evaluation in blockchain-based health care applications by proposing TokenHealth, a collaborative health monitoring system with gamification and token-based incentives implemented via smart contracts on Ethereum. Preliminary results showed smart contract execution takes less than a minute for a full cycle, and costs for private and public networks were discussed.
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.