Always love it when the people side can solve the technical problem 
In any case, for my own learning and for fun, I created a proposed implementation of this for the simple case of infoBox and valueBox. It can be seen in this PR, or installed with
devtools::install_github("colearendt/shinydashboard@stream-box")
Further, this is an example in action (alongside the previous):
library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)
ui <- dashboardPage(
dashboardHeader(),
dashboardSidebar(),
dashboardBody(
valueBoxOutput("value_box"),
infoBoxOutput("info_box"),
infoBox("Title", 45, "Subtitle", icon = icon("bar-chart"), id = "testbox"),
valueBox(id = "someid", 45, "Subtitle", icon = icon("dashboard"))
),
title = "Test Streaming"
)
server <- function(input, output, session) {
value <- reactiveVal(45)
output$value_box <- renderValueBox({
valueBox(value(), "Subtitle", icon = icon("dashboard"))
})
output$info_box <- renderInfoBox({
infoBox("Title", value(), "Subtitle", icon = icon("bar-chart"))
})
observe({
invalidateLater(1000)
isolate(value(value() + 1))
print(paste("Updated value:", value()))
updateBoxValue(
session,
someid = value(),
testbox = value()
)
})
}
# Run the application
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)