<p>Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are found to be increasingly important in the current day healthcare sector for real time patient monitoring and secured information between medical equipment’s and healthcare professionals. Nevertheless, securing the WBAN networks faces difficulties in the presence of the resource constraints. The work of this study is to propose a lightweight authentication scheme that guarantees authentic communication of the patient to the doctor, as well as to mitigate the most important security vulnerabilities. In this paper we propose a scheme that bases on bilinear pairing and cryptographic hash function to build a robust authentication mechanism. It undergoes a comprehensive security analysis concerning the resistance against impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks, the ability to keep forward secrecy and user anonymity. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of performance and it is found to reduce the computational and communication overhead by 27% and 18% respectively over existing authentication mechanisms thereby making it an efficient scheme for WBAN applications. The results show that the proposed authentication scheme improves security while keeping computational overhead down as well as consuming fewer resources, making it especially suitable for authenticating data during live WBAN operation.</p>