Ensuring proper living conditions for an ever growing number of elderly people is an important challenge for many countries. The difficulty and cost of hiring and training specialized personnel has fostered research in assistive robotics as a viable alternative. In particular, this paper studies the case of a robotic wheelchair, specifically its autonomous navigation and user adapted control. Integration of a technique to interpret user intention using head movements and a human aware motion planner is presented. Test results exhibit emerging behavior showing a robotic wheelchair interpreting gesture commands and taking the user to his desired goal, respecting social conventions during its navigation.