Open AccessThe continuous monitoring on the operated machine can allow the industrial manufacturers to proactively react to the degenerations of the parts. Therefore, development of precise and cost-effective sensing system gains a lot of interest lately. In this paper we proposed and demonstrated a wireless sensing system, which is composed by a temperature sensor module and a Wi-Fi transceiver module, aiming to ball screw health monitoring. This sensing unit is built up by SMD-type glass PT-100 under extreme size restriction (~1 cm3), whereas the Wi-Fi module is integrated with a microcontroller on a printed circuit board with size less than 5 cm2. An experimental setup has been performed on a single-axis ball screw stage using three temperature sensors embedded at different positions. Those temperature data are successfully measured and wireless transmitted to the central computer, verifying the feasibility of this proposed system.