Yes, which is precisely what I said, in different words. Now hardware iterative cycles are different than in software, where you can just define perfect interfaces and get a lossless roundtrip between them. In hardware you always have loss, so sometimes that software analogy does not work.

To have an actuator that is useful to measure you skin sensor, that actuator does not only need to be complimentary, it needs to be better than the sensor (otherwise you're only measuring the flaws of the actuator). So quite often you will need to take a different approach than just a complimentary actuator/sensor-pair and make one of the two a specialized overly accurate and incredibly pricey fixture.