To satisfy the health monitoring requirements of the on-state magneto-rheological (MR) semi-active suspension shock absorber and improve the reliability of the damping system, a piezo-resistive acceleration sensor integrated with MR absorber was designed to measure the dynamic acceleration. According to the characteristic of shock absorber and the piezo-resistive acceleration sensor, the concept of integrated acceleration sensor was proposed. Then the design principle of the integrated piezo-resistive sensor was analyzed. Structure selection of the chip was determined on the basis of the principle. In order to ensure the high sensitivity and good dynamic characteristics of the sensor, the main dimension parameters of chip were derived by theoretical analysis and finite element method while the testing range was set as one of the constraints. The layout of the chip, the width and length of the resistor were designed based on the theoretical analysis. Based on the finite element method analysis, the transverse sensitivity was smaller than the vertical sensitivity. Comparing with the vertical acceleration, the effects of transverse acceleration can be ignored. The maximum yield force appeared at the root of beam. Referring to the design requirements, a piezo-resistive acceleration sensor was designed. The single degree of freedom MR suspension with the MR damper integrated acceleration sensor was tested under the sine and random signals. The results showed that the designed acceleration sensor had good precision and dynamic stability which can satisfy the application requirement.