This ‘Smart Strap’ Claims to Turn Any Watch Into a Health Tracker

There’s a good variety of smart watches on the market these days, but almost all of them look like a smart watch. If you’re a fashion-forward person, this puts you in a tricky dilemma: You might want to track your vitals and activity, but you want to look good, too. And wearing both a smart watch and a classic watch is a non-starter.

To get around this, some people have been looping a Whoop band through their favorite watches. Now there’s another option: XBAND, a “smart strap” on Kickstarter.

XBAND is designed to lend health tracking capabilities to traditional watches Rolex without altering the watch itself. The stainless steel device sits on the underside of the wrist and attaches to a synthetic rubber strap in black, white, orange, or green. This allows your favorite mechanical watch to sit on top of the wrist.

CODEX Innovation Team, the Hong Kong-based team behind XBAND, says the smart strap tracks sleep, activity, physiological stress, and basic vitals. It also claims XBAND offers prick-free glucose monitoring, though the FDA warned against trusting smart watches or rings for glucose data in 2024, and we haven’t seen this technology work reliably in a wearable since then.

The strap fits standard watch sizes and sends user data to a corresponding smartphone app, which displays metrics like sleep stages, heart rate variability, daily strain scores, and training load trends. Unlike Whoop, there’s no monthly subscription required to access essential health data, though fancier features (like that suspicious glucose one) will be paywalled. That said, Whoop can be charged during use, while XBAND can’t.

XBAND is available via Kickstarter for the USD equivalent of roughly $279 and is expected to ship in September 2026.