This paper addresses the event-triggered based adaptive asymptotic tracking control problem for switched nonlinear systems with unknown control directions based on neural network technique. A novel asymptotic tracking controller, in which Nussbaum functions are introduced to address the issue of unknown control directions, is designed by combining neural network control technology and event-triggered strategy. Different from the existing tracking control schemes, the proposed controller in this paper can guarantee that the tracking error ς 1 asymptotically converges to the origin and reduce the communication burden from the controller to the actuator. Finally, the effectiveness of the presented control design is proved by numerical examples.