Semi-live dashboard

I'm working to help a business partner create a dashboard that they hope to have up on a monitor for several people to see.  I hoping to vet out what's possible.

Requirements:

• Hands off refresh of data on the screen
• Web API data source
• Data is NOT streaming
• Refreshable between 30 and 90 seconds
• meant to show new cases to work, along with a timer until closed

I know there was new functionality where the dashboard page will refresh, but only works for direct query data sources and I have an API.  Even if I configure the dataset to refresh (which I still have to figure out how to do this via a gateway since it uses a bearer token), the dataset would refresh, but unless someone interacts with the dashboard, the dashboard won't show the refreshed data...right?

I've made the suggestion to MSFT to add the page refresh capability to Web data sources as well, but until then, my recomendation is for people to just access the dashboard themselves and hit refresh, which I'm assuming with a Web API datasource will re-engage the API call and not just try to pull from the dataset??  Open to other ideas/thoughts.