This paper presents a method to measure the catheter motion for a simulation of medical catheterization procedures. An optical navigation sensor used in a common computer mouse is utilized to measure the translational and rotational velocity of the clinical catheter. Catheter passage is designed to keep the catheter inside the effective sensing area of the optical sensor. Experiment results show that the developed device can measure the velocity up to 150 mm/s in translation and 6 rad/s in rotation. Errors are 6.78 % and 19.5 % in the axial and radial measurements, respectively. The RMS errors are 3.69 mm/s and 0.6 rad/s for the respective directions.