With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, environmental monitoring systems using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received considerable attention. Reliable object detection and tracking is an important research issue in various WSN applications, such as environment and disaster monitoring, disaster propagation tracking, and intruder monitoring and tracking. Generally, because batteries are used as energy sources for sensors in WSNs, a highly energy-efficient operation is needed to prolong the life of the sensors and networks. To save energy, sensors usually manage multi-mode sensing operations, in which they periodically switch between active and inactive periods. A tradeoff exists between object detection accuracy and energy efficiency when we select a sensing schedule. Depending on the object speed, direction, and sensor deployment topology, different sensing schedules should be dynamically applied to individual sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent neural network (RNN)-based dynamic duty cycle control method for sensor nodes. For RNN training, a target optimal duty cycle for a given network condition is derived from the proposed digital twin-space analytic solution. Simulation results show that the proposed model provides accurate object detection performance and achieves high energy efficiency.INDEX TERMS Duty cycle control, machine learning, object tracking, recurrent neural network, wireless sensor networks.