The paper outlines the basic features concerning the design of 'embedded' control and compensation algorithms suitable to be employed in smart sensors and actuators, for real time applications. The stringent specifications in such devices require suitable compensation algorithms that can be implemented in cheap and low performance computation units (such as commercial micro-controllers). This paper, starting from a comprehensive analysis of the solutions proposed in recent years for such a task, shows how the capability to describe the behavior of materials having strong magneto-elastic coupling with hysteresis, allows us to employ standard control-based algorithms that are, at the same time, widely effective. The proposed approach is described for actual magnetostrictive actuators.