The introduction in 2012 of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area networks (BAN) stimulates the research of practical and efficient receiver implementations. One of the main challenges in this context deals with the signal synchronization for the impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) physical layer. Targeting non-coherent detectors, which are known to offer significant energy-per-bit savings over their coherent counterparts, this paper presents a novel standard-compliant synchronization technique. The proposed technique is based on inter-pulse time interval detection and comparison. The associated performance has been evaluated using relevant channel models specified in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Promising results are demonstrated in terms of number of synchronization success rate and time.