The modular Nex Band makes smart alerts more customizable than ever

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

We're still trying to figure out what we want our wearables, particularly wristbands, to do for us. There are a number of devices including some smartwatches and fitness trackers that are truly multipurpose, but we have yet to see what features will stick in the long run. Now, a company called Mighty Cast is taking a slightly different approach to smart wristbands with its Nex Band—it's made to do pretty much anything that an existing fitness tracker or smartwatch can already do. It monitors activity and receives smartphone alerts, but you can personalize notifications and actions as much as you want by "hacking" its small, removable modules, creating numerous possibilities for new features.

The Nex Band has been floating around for the past couple years, but it has the chance to entice the most enterprising wearable users by giving them more personalization options than any other wristband. Mighty Cast bills it as a hackable smart band because you can assign functions to each of its five "mods" that are all independent from each other and can relate to different things. You might tap on of your mods to turn on your living room lights, while the mod next to it flashes when you receive an e-mail from your boss. A nearly infinite number of functions can be customized from within the Nex Band's companion app, and it's also compatible with all of IFTTT's control combinations.

When I sat down with Mighty Cast's CEO Adam Adelman to learn more about the Nex Band, I was initially confused as to how it worked. However, you don't need to be a developer or have special tech skills to "hack" the band—it's all done from the companion app. Once you choose which mod you want to customize, a basic hack has a two-step "when X happens, do Y" formula. It's really similar to how IFTTT sets up its automated actions by integrating social media, smartphone alerts, IoT products, and other devices to work more for you. For example, you could program a hack that say "when I double-tap, play My Workout Playlist." Then when you completed that action on that mod, your smartphone will start to play that particular playlist.

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