Development of a locomotive mechanism for the capsule type endoscopes will largely enhance their ability to diagnose disease of digestive organs. As a part of it, there should be provided a detection device of their position in human organs for the purpose of observation and motion control. In this paper, a permanent magnet outside human body was employed to project magnetic field on a capsule type endoscope, while its position dependent flux density was measured by three hall-effect sensors which were orthogonally installed inside the capsule. In order to detect the 2-D position data of the capsule with three hall-effect sensors including the roll, pitch and yaw angle, the permanent magnet was extra translated during the measurement. In this way, the 2-D coordinates and three rotation angles of a capsule endoscope on the same motion plane with the permanent magnet could be detected. The working principle and performance test results of the capsule position detection device were introduced in this paper showing that they could be also applied to 6-DOF position detection.