Advances in the manufacturing of micromechanical structures now make it possible to produce sensor surfaces that enable new forms of spatial and temporal signal acquisition. These include, for example, bristle-like fibre sensors that can detect the near-wall region of wall-bounded flows with virtually no feedback on the flow itself. If considered as a rigid bending beam on which the incoming flow acts as a line force, this allows the instantaneous velocity signal in the streamwise and spanwise direction to be determined from the bending moment at the sensor root. However, if such fibre sensors are to be used to detect near-wall structures in turbulent wall-bounded flows – both for characterizing the flow field or for measuring necessary input signals for flow control purposes – it is often the wall-normal velocity component v that is decisive. However, this component cannot be obtained directly from the root bending moment. This paper presents a possible methodology to estimate the prevailing wall-normal velocity component from the bending moment in the streamwise and spanwise direction and evaluates its robustness using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) data of a turbulent channel flow. This methodology is mainly based on the continuity equation, in which the spatial derivatives of the bending moments in the streamwise and spanwise direction are included. It is shown that the method is capable of predicting the fully 3D flow field up to wall distances of \(y^+\approx 30\) as a good qualitative approximation.